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PRINCETON  .  NEW  JERSEY 

FROM  THE  LIBRARY  OF 
ROBERT  ELLIOTT  SPEER 

^*.    *^-     ^j^fi. 

Hankey,  Donald  William 

Alers,  1884-1916. 
The  church  and  the  man 

BR  123  .H3 


<^.    l^aJL    dl-^ 


i 


THE  CHURCH 

AND  THE  MAN 


THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

NEW  VORK  •   BOSTON  •   CHICAGO  •   DALLAS 
-      ATLANTA  •   SAN  FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN  &  CO.,  Limited 

LONDON  •  BOMBAY  •  CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE  MACMILLAN  CO.  OF  CANADA,  Ltd. 

TORONTO 


THE  CHURCH 
AND  THE  M 


BY 

DONALD  HANKEY 

Author  of  "A  Student  in  Arms,"  sta 


WITH  A  FOREWORD  BY 

C.  H.  S.  MATHEWS 


Nrm  fork 
THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

1917 

AK  rights  reserved 


AU  rights  reserved 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

In  Memoriam vii 

CHAPTER 

I    A  Personal  Explanation      ...  3 

II    An  Average  Man's  Beliefs  ...  14 

III  The  Troubles  of  an  Average  Lay- 

man       25 

IV  The  Gospel  and  the  Church  .     .  34 
V    Methods  and  Weapons  ....  45 

VI    Revelation  and  Common  Sense     .  51 
VII    The  Church  and   Human   Rela- 


tions     64 

VIII    Missions 78 


--     IN  MEMORIAM 
DONALD   HANKEY 

Killed  in  action  on  the  Somme,  nth  October. 
1916. 

The  news  that  Donald  Hankey  had  fallen  in 
action  brought  to  thousands  of  people  who 
had  never  seen  him  —  and  the  present  writer 
was  one  of  these  —  the  kind  of  poignant 
sense  of  loss  which  is  usually  associated  with 
the  death  of  an  intimate  personal  friend.  It 
was  not  merely  that  one  felt  that  the  Church 
and  the  nation  had  lost  yet  another  man  of 
brilliant  gifts,  who  could  ill  be  spared.  The 
real  secret  of  this  sense  of  personal  loss  lay 
in  the  rich  humanity,  the  extraordinary  sym- 
pathy, the  understanding  of  all  sorts  of  men, 
which  his  writing  revealed.     We  can  almost 


vili  In  Memoriam 

apply  to  him  the  description,  In  one  of  the 
most  perfect  of  all  his  essays,  of  the  relation 
which  came  to  exist  between  "  The  Beloved 
Captain  "  and  his  men:  — 

"  There  was  a  bond  of  mutual  confidence  and 
affection  between  us,  which  grew  stronger  and 
stronger  as  the  months  passed." 

We  felt  that  we  really  grew  to  know  him, 
and  we  were  sure  that  he  knew  us  through  and 
through.  This  wonderful  insight  into  human 
nature  gave  him  the  power  to  speak  di- 
rectly to  the  human  heart.  That  he  was 
no  mean  theologian  was  clear  from  the 
fact  that,  though  handicapped  by  having  left 
school  at  the  age  of  sixteen  for  the  R.M. 
Academy  at  Woolwich,  and  having  subse- 
quently served  for  six  years  In  the  R.G.A., 
he  secured  a  Second  Class  in  Theology  at 
Oxford.  But  his  great  aim,  and  his  great 
achievement  in  theology,  was  the  Interpre- 
tation in  life  of  the  learning  of  the  schools. 


In  Memoriam 


IX 


He  sought  and  he  found  a  gospel  for  the 
plain  man,  educated  or  uneducated,  which 
took  into  real  account  the  progress  of  crit- 
ical learning.  A  singularly  inept  reviewer, 
In  a  rationalist  paper,  gibed  at  him  for  say- 
ing in  Faith  or  Fear? 

"  I  learnt  to  reconcile  Genesis  and  the  Origin  of 
SpecteSj  or  rather  to  read  the  one  without  being 
worried  by  recollections  of  the  other." 

On  this  the  reviewer  in  question  trium- 
phantly remarks:^ — 

"  Precisely !  Put  aside  the  facts  of  evolution, 
and  it  is  quite  easy  to  accept  a  theory  of  special  cre- 
ation the  day  before  yesterday,  or  to  mould  that 
theory  into  a  shape  which  its  author  could  not 
recognize." 

But  of  course  Donald  Hankey  neither  ac- 
cepted nor  moulded  any  "  theory  of  special 
creation."  He  read  the  first  chapters  of 
Genesis,  as  every  Modernist  reads  them,  as 
the  noblest  of  all  creation-myths,  and  as  far 


X  In  Memortam 

more  akin  to  poetry  than  to  science.  He 
had  nothing  in  common  with  those  extraordi- 
narily dull  and  stupid  persons  who  produce 
elaborate  attempts  to  ''  reconcile  "  the  letter 
of  scripture  with  the  teaching  of  science.  He 
could  not  have  anything  in  common  with 
them,  for  he  was  not  stupid,  and  he  never 
wrote  anything  that  was  dull.  But  though 
his  singular  honesty  and  candour  made  him 
ready  to  recognize  and  accept  whatever  re- 
sults of  criticism  seemed  to  him  to  be  as- 
sured, he  himself  was  not,  and  he  never  pro- 
fessed to  be,  a  critic.  He  said  of  himself, 
in  his  preface  to  his  first  book.  The  Lord  of 
all  Good  Life  —  quite  the  best  book,  by  the 
way,  to  put  into  the  hands  of  the  average 
person  seeking  for  a  positive  statement  of 
the  truth  of  the  Gospel,  without  ignoring  or 
explaining  away  real  difficulties,  in  regard, 
for  instance,  to  miracles  —  that  he  "is  not 
concerned  to  temper  the  wind  (of  criticism) 


In  Meriioriani  xi 

to  the  shorn  lamb,"  nor  anxious  to  "  reas- 
sure "  any  one.  His  object  is  just  to  set 
forth  his  own  honestly  thought  out  faith,  and 
he  closes  this  same  preface  with  this  charac- 
teristic sentence :  — 

"  To  the  laity  of  the  Church  of  England,  to  all 
who  in  shops,  and  factories,  and  barrack-rooms,  and 
messes,  and  colleges,  and  hospitals,  and  ships,  and 
wherever  else  men  are  gathered  together,  are  try- 
ing to  fight  the  battle  of  Christ  with  the  poorest  of 
equipment,  this  book  is  dedicated  in  loving  fellow- 
ship." 

There  is  no  need  here  to  repeat  the  story 
of  his  own  inner  life,  since  he  has  told  it  in 
his  own  words  in  the  first  chapters  of  this 
book,  but  it  is  perhaps  worth  while  pointing 
out  that,  after  he  had  lost  the  second-hand  be- 
liefs of  his  childhood,  his  progress  towards 
a  vital  and  evangelistic  personal  faith  had 
four  distinct  phases.  First,  he  came  to  see 
the  impossibihty  of  accounting  for  the  exist- 
ence of  the  human  spirit  from  the  rationalist 


xli  In  Memoriam 

standpoint.  This  led  him  to  Theism.  He 
could  not  stop  there.  A  vivid,  personal  ex- 
perience set  him  seeking  for  the  personal 
knowledge  of  Christ.  To  achieve  this  he 
left  the  Army,  and  went  to  Oxford.  Ox- 
ford, he  says,  taught  him  that  It  was  possi- 
ble to  be  a  Christian  without  doing  violence 
to  his  intellectual  honesty,  but  it  did  not  give 
him  "  a  gospel  for  ordinary  men,"  nor  did  he 
find  this  at  Leeds  Clergy  School.  But  he 
could  be  content  with  nothing  less,  and  he 
saw  that  in  order  to  get  it  he  must  first  know 
ordinary  men.  To  gain  this  knowledge  he 
embarked  on  the  adventurous  odyssey  which 
really  only  ended  with  his  death.  On  this 
odyssey  he  learnt  the  secret  that  only  he  can 
aspire  to  teach  men  who  Is  always  learning 
from  them.  In  the  Oxford  settlement  In 
Bermondsey,  In  the  steerage  of  a  German 
liner.  In  the  Bush  of  Australia,  in  the  barrack- 
room,  and  In  hospital,  he  learnt  to  love  his 


In  Memoriam  xiii 

fellow-men,  and  to  know  them  with  the  in- 
sight that  is  born  of  love.  And  in  them  he 
found  the  Christ  for  whom  he  sought.  He 
found  Him,  as  indeed  the  Gospel  taught  him 
to  find  Him,  very  often  unrecognized  by  those 
who  without  knowing  it  served  Him,  and 
very  often  crucified  by  those  who  knew  not 
what  they  did.  And  so  it  was  that  he  read 
the  Gospel  in  the  light  cast  upon  it  by  his 
insight  into  the  hearts  and  the  spiritual  needs 
of  "  the  common  people,'*  and  then,  in  his 
first  book,  he  set  himself  to  re-interpret  The 
Lord  of  all  Good  Life  to  the  men  he  so 
passionately  loved.  He  had  found  now  the 
secret  of  all  vital  religious  teaching,  for  he 
had  learnt  to  read  the  ancient  documents  of 
the  Faith  in  the  light  of  the  signs  of  his  own 
times,  and  to  interpret  the  signs  of  the  times 
in  the  light  of  the  ancient  records.  He 
"  searched  the  scriptures  "  Indeed,  but,  un- 
like the  scribes  and  the  pharisees,  he  remem- 


xlv  In  Memoriam 

bered  that  from  the  rehgious  point  of  view 
these  were  valueless  except  in  so  far  as  they 
led  to  the  recognition  of  the  living  Saviour 
of  men. 

So  he  came  to  teach,  like  the  Master  whose 
loyal  disciple  he  was,  "  with  authority,  and 
not  as  the  scribes."  And,  as  we  all  know, 
the  war  gave  to  him,  just  as  he  seemed  to 
have  mastered  this  secret,  what  he  believed 
to  be  his  great  opportunity.  "  With  the  man 
in  the  street,"  he  says,  "  it  is  not  words  that 
count,  but  deeds."  He,  who  could  have  had 
a  commission  for  the  asking,  humbled  him- 
self to  enlist  with  "  the  common  people,"  to 
share  to  the  full  the  drudgery  and  hardship 
of  the  life  of  the  camp  and  the  trenches. 
He  hated  war  with  all  his  heart.  He  dis- 
trusted, as  every  sensitive  soul  must  distrust, 
his  own  courage.  "  I  am  really  not  at  all 
brave,"  he  once  wrote  to  me,  and,  in  another 
letter,  he  described  the  war  as  "  Hell  —  with 


In  Memoriam  xv 

compensations  " —  the  compensations  consist- 
ing for  him  mainly  in  fellowship  with  men  he 
loved  and  admired.  When  he  was  Invalided 
home  from  the  front,  he  found  his  chief  re- 
lief from  the  boredom  of  life  In  hospital, 
and,  subsequently,  in  training  (after  he  had 
accepted  a  commission,  only  because  In  view 
of  the  dearth  of  officers  he  felt  It  his  duty 
to  do  so),  by  writing  his  wonderful  articles 
in  the  Spectator,  and  his  share  of  Faith  or 
Fear?  In  the  former,  published  In  book 
form,  with  the  title  A  Student  in  Arms,  he 
just  wrote  of  life  in  the  new  army  as  he 
knew  It,  and  of  his  comrades  and  his  officers 
as  he  knew  them.  It  does  not  profess  to  be 
a  religious  book,  but  It  Is  the  most  religious 
book  yet  written  about  the  war.  It  has  none 
of  the  ecclesiastical  self-consciousness  of  such 
a  book  as  Priests  in  the  Firing  Line.  It  is 
religious  because,  for  Donald  Hankey,  all 
life   was    fundamentally    religious.     It   was 


xvi  In  Memoriam 

just  this  that  made  life  so  well  worth  living, 
and  so  well  worth  laying  down  in  a  good 
cause.  For  the  chaplain  this  book  is  not 
merely  a  literary  delight,  it  is  a  storehouse 
of  materials  for  better  sermons  than  he  has 
ever  preached  to  his  men  before.  For  Don- 
ald Hankey,  Jesus  Christ  was  really  and  truly 
"  the  Captain  of  our  Salvation  " —  the  Be- 
loved Captain  —  who  shares  to  the  full  the 
experiences  of  His  men,  asks  them  to  do 
nothing  He  would  not  do  Himself,  and  is 
with  them  at  every  moment,  whatever  their 
need  may  be.  He  really  believed  what  many 
profess  to  believe  without  really  believing 
it,  that  "  of  ourselves  we  can  do  no  good  1 
thing."  Therefore,  wherever  he  found 
goodness  he  found  God.  He  would  never 
have  assented  to  such  an  idea  as  that  pro- 
pounded by  the  Bishop  of  London  in  his 
preface  to  Canon  Box's  recent  book,  that  the 
Virgin  birth  marks   the   difference  between 


In  Memoriam  xvii 

One  who  is  divine  and  one  who  would  other- 
wise have  been  *'  only  a  good  man."  For 
him  "  if  man  is  the  son  of  nature  he  is  also  " 
(just  in  so  far  as  he  is  truly  and  fully  man) 
*'  the  son  of  God,  his  Father  in  heaven." 
As  he  says  in  the  first  Appendix  to  The  Lord 
of  all  Good  Life:  — 

**  It  is  only  the  fact  that  the  Virgin  Birth  and  the 
bodily  resurrection  are  told  of  Jesus  that  makes 
them  appear  credible  to  those  who  believe  in  Jesus. 
In  other  words,  none  can  be  asked  to  believe  that 
Jesus  was  the  Son  of  God  because  He  is  said  to  have 
been  born  of  a  virgin,  and  to  have  risen  bodily  from 
the  grave ;  though  it  may  happen  that  a  person  who 
believes,  on  other  grounds,  that  Jesus  was  the  Son 
of  God,  and  is  now  alive,  may  feel  that  the  stories 
of  the  virgin  birth  and  the  resurrection  of  the  body 
are  for  that  reason  either  probably,  or  even  neces- 
sarily, true.  To  them  the  story  told  by  St.  Luke 
will  be  acceptable.  That  is  to  say  that  though  these 
stories  are  not  evidence  of  the  Divine  Sonship  of 
Jesus,  they  may  be  regarded  as  implied  by  it.  Since, 
however,  the  Divine  Sonship  cannot  be  proved  by 
these  stories,  it  follows  that  it  cannot  be  disproved 
by  their  rejection.     It  must  also  be  pointed  out  that 


xvlii  In  Memoriam 

the  rejection  of  these  stories  does  not  discredit  the 
remainder  of  the  Gospels  of  which  they  are  a  part, 
because  all  higher  critics  are  agreed  that  they  are 
derived  from  different  sources  to  the  rest  of  the 
Gospels." 

And  he  concludes  this  same  appendix  by  say- 
ing:— 

**  The  man  who  has  recognized  the  freedom  of 
Jesus  and  has  found  freedom  and  power  in  trying 
to  imitate  Him  and  share  His  point  of  view,  and 
by  praying  in  His  Name  to  His  Father,  and  who 
has  found  love  and  fellowship  and  life  as  a  member 
of  His  Body  the  Church,  will  not  easily  doubt 
either  that  He  was  the  Son  of  God,  or  that  He  is 
alive.  The  man  who  has  not  experienced  any  of 
these  things,  nor  recognized  them  in  others,  has  not 
understood  the  foundations  of  Christianity." 

We  have  quoted  this  passage  at  length  be- 
cause, In  Its  fearless  honesty,  in  Its  conse- 
crated common  sense,  It  Is  quite  typical  of 
all  Hankey's  theological  writing. 

No  theology  which  could  not  stand  the 
test  of  life  had  any  kind  of  validity  for  him. 


In  Memoriam  xix 

It  was  a  shock  to  him  to  find  professing 
Christians  unable  to  face  the  perils  of  the 
trenches  and  having  to  be  sent  back  out  of 
the  danger  zone.  Christianity,  for  him, 
made  men  free,  as  His  Master  was  free, 
j  from  the  tyranny  of  all  external  circum- 
stances, and  above  all,  from  the  tyranny  of 
fear.  And  always  he  tested  his  theory  in 
action.  It  was  wholly  characteristic  of  him 
that  quite  deliberately  he  set  himself  to  dis- 
cuss the  truth  about  the  fear  of  death.  Did 
men  fear  death  or  not?  If  not,  what  did 
they  fear?  He  concluded  that  most  men 
had  no  fear  of  death  when  they  were  faced 
by  it,  though  there  was  in  them  a  natural 
physical  shrinking  from  the  indignity  of 
wounds  and  mutilation  and  physical  pain 
.  .  .  and  then  having  made  his  observations 
and  written  down  his  conclusions,  he  went 
out  to  test  his  theories  in  the  thick  of  the 
fight.  .  .  .  He  faced  death  as  gallantly  as 


XX  In  Memoriam 

he  had  faced  life,  and,  true  disciple  of  His 
Master  as  he  was,  he  made  of  death  not  a 
defeat,  but  the  final  victory  of  his  life. 

C.  H.  S.  Matthews. 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  MAN 


THE  CHURCH  AND 

THE  MAN 

CHAPTER  I 

A  PERSONAL   EXPLANATION 

The  object  of  these  papers  is  to  try  to  help 
find  out  how  we  can  make  the  Church  a  bet- 
ter, a  more  efficient,  a  more  vital,  a  more 
healthy  body  for  Our  Lord  Jesus  Christ.  It 
is  a  subject  which  no  one  who  loves  the  Mas- 
ter and  reveres  Him  as  the  Son  of  God  can 
approach  without  a  feeling  of  the  greatest 
diffidence,  the  most  utter  humility,  the  most 
searching  self-criticism.  For  the  member 
who  has  himself  failed,  as  we  have  all  failed, 
to  criticize  the  failure  of  the  body  is  a  task 
from  which  any  one  may  well  shrink.  More- 
over, the  reader  will  naturally  want  to  know 
3 


4  The  Church  and  the  Man 

what  sort  of  a  person  it  is  that  is  daring  to 
criticize,  what  credentials  he  has.  There- 
fore I  have  been  asked  to  write  a  personal 
preface  to  my  chapters,  so  as  to  give  the 
reader  some  chance  of  forming  an  opinion 
as  to  what  weight  to  attach  to  my  ideas.  No 
one  likes  to  be  accused  of  egoism,  and  it  does 
seem  egotistical  to  write  about  oneself;  but 
the  request  seems  so  reasonable  that  I  am 
going  to  take  the  risk,  and  try  to  comply  with 
It. 

In  my  boyhood  I  learnt  to  connect  Church- 
manshlp  with  all  that  was  good  and  noble  in 
life.  My  mother  was  a  devout  Church- 
woman,  and  she  was  also  a  very  humble,  very 
unselfish  woman,  giving  herself  up  com- 
pletely to  her  husband,  her  children,  and  the 
poor  and  unfortunate  among  her  neighbours. 
My  father,  though  a  layman,  was  a  great 
reader  of  theology,  and  as  a  proof  of  his 
breadth  of  view  I  may  mention  that  his  fa- 


A  Personal  Explanation  5 

vourlte  writers  were  Maurice,  Robertson, 
Hawels,  Dale,  Westcott,  and  McLeod 
Campbell.  I  never  learnt  to  connect  religion 
with  narrowness,  or  with  smug  self-satisfac- 
tion, or  with  harsh  judgments  of  others,  be- 
cause these  features  were  wholly  absent  from 
the  religion  of  my  home. 

When  I  was  sixteen  I  lost  my  mother,  and 
went  to  the  R.M.  Academy,  Woolwich,  after- 
wards obtaining  a  commission  in  the  Royal 
Garrison  Artillery.  In  the  six  years  which 
followed  I  learnt  something  of  the  average 
immorality  of  the  unrellgious  man,  which 
disgusted  me,  and  of  the  scepticism  that  is 
embodied  in  the  publications  of  the  Rational- 
ist Press  Association.  At  last,  when  I  was 
in  a  distant  tropical  colony,  I  found  that  I 
was  on  the  brink  of  materialistic  determinism. 
I  hated  it;  but  my  belief  in  the  Bible  as  the 
word  of  God  had  been  shattered,  and  the 
pygmy  Insignificance  of  man  considered  as  a 


6  The  Church  and  the  Man 

purely  physical  being  had  sunk  into  my  soul. 
Just  as  I  had  almost  decided  that  the  only 
honest  thing  to  do  was  to  abandon  all  pre- 
tence of  religion,  I  had  an  experience  which 
revealed  to  me  once  for  all  that  It  was  impos- 
sible for  me  to  deny  the  reality  of  the  human 
soul,  and  the  effective  existence  of  men's  con- 
science and  reason  and  emotions.  I  suddenly 
realized  that  man  was  not  only  of  pygmy  in- 
significance by  reason  of  his  short  life  and 
limited  strength,  but  that  he  was  also,  by  vir- 
tue of  his  unique  self-consciousness,  Immeas- 
urably greater  than  any  purely  physical  or- 
ganism. He  was  at  once  an  Insect  and  a 
god  In  comparison  with  the  rest  of  the  uni- 
verse. I  can  best  sum  up  my  thought  In  a 
doggerel  verse  that  I  wrote  at  the  time:  — 

Am  I  an  atom  in  a  soulless  scheme, 
My  body  real,  but  my  soul  a  dream  ? 
Ah  yes,  ah  yes,  but  how  explain  the  birth 
Of  dreams  of  soul  upon  a  soulless  earth? 


A  Personal  Explanation  7 

I  have  never  found  another  answer  but  that 
of  Christ,  that  if  man  Is  the  son  of  nature  he 
Is  also  the  son  of  God,  his  Father  In  heaven. 
From  that  day  I  was  a  thelst.  It  was 
something,  but  not  enough.  A  mere  abstract 
belief  that  God  exists  Is  not  of  much  practical 
use  to  any  one.  I  longed  for  something 
more  Inspiring,  and  one  day  this  sentence 
flashed  across  my  mind:  "If  you  would 
know  Christ,  behold  He  Is  at  work  In  His 
vineyard."  I  took  the  vineyard  to  mean 
poorer  England,  and  at  the  earliest  oppor- 
tunity I  resigned  my  commission  with  a  view 
to  becoming  a  slum  parson.  I  was  advised 
to  go  to  a  university,  and  In  due  course  went 
to  Oxford  and  read  the  Honours  school  of 
theology.  Oxford  proved  stimulating  In- 
tellectually. I  did  not  consort  very  much 
with  what  we  Irreverently  designated  "  the 
PI  Push,"  feeling  that  I  should  learn  more 
by  making  friends  outside  the  circle  of  those 


8  The  Church  and  the  Man 

who  were  intending  to  be  ordained.  I  learnt 
to  reconcile  Genesis  and  the  "  Origin  of  Spe- 
cies," or  rather  to  read  the  one  without  be- 
ing worried  by  recollections  of  the  other.  I 
learnt  to  love  the  prophets  and  the  epistles, 
and  to  find  in  the  study  of  Comparative  Re- 
ligion a  strong  reason  for  believing  in  the 
especial  inspiration  of  both  Judaism  and 
Christianity.  I  learnt  to  be  intellectually  a 
Modernist,  and  to  find  that  I  could  be  a 
Christian  without  doing  violence  to  my  in- 
tellectual honesty.  But  I  did  not  learn  a 
gospel  for  ordinary  men.  My  religion  was 
still  mainly  an  intellectual  matter,  and  not 
inspiration  or  power  or  love. 

After  a  holiday  In  the  wilds  of  Africa, 
and  in  Madagascar,  I  went  to  a  clergy  school, 
where  I  first  saw  parochial  life  at  close  quar- 
ters. What  I  saw  alarmed  me.  I  felt  that 
I  had  no  gospel  for  the  working  man,  and 
that  the  life  of  a  clergyman  offered  after  all 


A  Personal  Explanation  9 

no  prospect  of  usefulness  to  me.  I  funked 
it,  and  went  instead  to  a  Mission  in  poorer 
London.  I  went  as  a  layman  and  not  as  a 
clergyman,  as  a  learner  rather  than  as  a 
teacher. 

It  was  there  that  I  remembered  the  sen- 
tence which  had  come  to  my  mind  many  years 
before.  It  was  at  the  bedside  of  a  boy  dy- 
ing of  consumption  that  I  felt  for  the  first 
time  that  I  had  realized  the  presence  of 
Ghrist,  working  in  His  vineyard.  As  time 
went  on,  however,  I  felt  more  and  more  that 
I  could  not  preach  to  these  working  boys  un- 
til I  had  in  some  way  shared  their  life  in  a 
degree  far  greater  than  was  possible  as  a 
manager  of  clubs.  Everything  was  so  easy 
for  me  and  so  hard  for  them  that  I  simply 
could  not  preach  to  them  without  feeling  a 
hypocrite.  At  the  same  time,  it  was  obvi- 
ously impossible  to  become  a  working  man 
in  England.     At  last  I  determined  to  try  to 


10  The  Church  and  the  Man 

become  one  in  Australia,  and  took  a  passage 
in  the  steerage  of  a  German  liner.  There 
I  slept  in  a  part  of  the  hold  which  was  fitted 
up  to  accommodate  more  than  two  hundred 
men.  The  men  who  slept  above  and  below 
and  round  me  were  mostly  Welsh  miners, 
and  in  the  following  five  weeks  I  learnt  a 
good  deal  about  human  nature  in  the  rough. 
On  arriving  in  Australia  I  found  it  much 
harder  than  I  had  expected  to  become  a  work- 
ing man.  I  worked  in  all  for  about  six 
months  in  the  bush,  and  learnt  a  little  of  what 
it  means  to  do  hard  manual  labour  in  pretty 
rough  surroundings.  At  the  same  time,  it 
was  not  quite  what  I  had  hoped  for,  and  in 
the  end  the  call  of  the  fleshpots  became  too 
insistent,  and  I  became  a  journalist  roaming 
about  Australia  in  search  of  copy. 

After  this  half-success  I  returned  to  Lon- 
don, and  again  lived  near  the  Mission,  and 
helped  to  run  a  boys*  club.     My  year  of 


A  Personal  Explanation  ii 

wandering  had  taught  me  a  good  deal,  and 
I  found  myself  able  to  write  a  book  ^  which 
was  an  attempt  to  express  in  simple  language 
and  for  simple  people  a  Modernist  Gospel. 
I  was  also  allowed  to  prepare  twelve  boys 
from  my  club  for  Confirmation,  an  experi- 
ence which  I  shall  never  forget,  and  which 
led  to  at  least  one  freindship  which  I  do  not 
think  will  end. 

Then  came  the  war,  and  I  enlisted  in 
Kitchener's  Army.  I  spent  nine  months  in 
England  and  three  at  the  front  in  the  ranks, 
and  feeling  that  I  had  learnt  a  little  more  I 
spent  my  time  in  hospital  writing  the  first 
of  the  Spectator  articles  which  have  since  been 
published  under  the  title  ''  A  Student  In 
Arms."  Since  then  I  have  held  a  commis- 
sion. 

Looking  back,  I  think  that  during  my  first 
years  in  the  army  I  was  learning  disillusion- 

i"The  Lord  of  All  Good  Life."     (Longmans.  2s.  6d.) 


12  The  Church  and  the  Man 

ment,  the  degradation  of  man  under  the  In- 
fluence of  a  pessimistic  determinism.  Dur- 
ing the  past  five  years  I  have  been  slowly 
learning  what  appears  to  me  a  sane  Idealism, 
and  the  wonderful  potentialities  of  man  for 
unselfishness  and  courage  and  nobility  when 
he  Is  under  the  Influence  of  a  sane  and  genu- 
ine religious  faith.  I  speak  not  of  what  I 
have  myself  attained,  but  of  what  I  have  seen 
In  other  men  and  women,  more  particularly 
in  those  who  have  been  faced  with  misfor- 
tune and  suffering.  It  is  they  who  have 
taught  me  more  than  any  one  else  to  believe 
and  to  hope  and  to  aspire.  As  I  write  now 
I  have  absolutely  no  doubt  of  the  power  of 
Christ  to  transform  character  and  life,  to 
change  the  poor  physical  pygmies  that  we 
men  are  Into  beloved  sons  of  God  and  In- 
heritors of  life  eternal.  And  that  Is  why  I 
feel  bound  to  do  what  I  can  to  try  to  Increase 
the  vitality  and  efficiency  of  Christ's  body 


A  Personal  Explanation  13 

the  Church,  that  it  may  prove  in  the  future  a 
more  adequate  medium  for  the  exercise  of 
His  wonderful  power  and  love  than  it  has 
been  in  the  past. 


CHAPTER  II 

AN  AVERAGE    MAN's   BELIEFS 

The  Average  Man  is  not  a  Churchman. 
That  Is  a  statement  that  needs  qualifying. 
Legally  he  Is  a  Churchman  —  he  has  been 
baptized.  Actually,  however,  he  would  not 
claim  the  title  unless  for  census  purposes,  or 
on  enlistment,  he  had  to  state  definitely  that 
he  was  something  or  nothing.  He  is  not  an 
Atheist  He  has  a  religion  of  a  sort.  He 
feels  that  he  is  more  "  C.  of  E."  than  any- 
thing else.  But  he  does  not  go  to  church. 
He  does  not  pray.  He  does  not  believe  the 
creeds.  He  does  not  attempt  to  regulate  his 
life  by  the  Church's  moral  law.  To  all  in- 
tents and  purposes  he  is  not  a  Churchman. 

He  has  a  religion  of  a  sort;  but  he  would 
14 


An  Average  Man's  Beliefs  15 

be  hard  put  to  it  if  he  had  to  explain  what 
it  was.  His  behefs  are  unformulated. 
Even  his  code  of  morals  and  conduct  gener- 
ally is  an  unwritten  one.  We  must  try  to 
formulate  it  for  him.  To  do  so  is  not  easy. 
You  can't  deduce  the  average  man's  religion 
from  his  actions  or  character.  Religion, 
when  it  is  as  nebulous  as  his,  does  not  rule 
a  man's  Hfe.  The  clue  is  rather  to  be  found 
in  the  qualities  which  he  admires,  despises, 
or  detests  in  other  people.  He  has  an  ideal; 
but  it  is  other  people  rather  than  himself  that 
he  judges  by  the  standard  of  that  ideal. 
Himself  he  does  not  judge  — -  chiefly  because 
he  has  never  learnt  to  pray. 

The  Average  Man  admires  courage,  gen- 
erosity, practical  kindness,  single-minded 
honesty,  persistence  in  trying  to  do  the  right 
thing. 

The  Average  Man  despises  meanness, 
physical  fear,  moral  cowardice,   instability. 


1 6  The  Church  and  the  Man 

equivocation,  narrow-mindedness,  subservi- 
ence to  mere  rank  or  wealth  or  power. 

The  Average  Man  hates  "  swank,"  cant, 
and  cruelty. 

These  are  the  kind  of  things  that  the 
Average  Man  admires,  despises,  or  hates. 
His  ideal  is  a  man  who  possesses  all  the 
qualities  that  he  admires,  and  is  free  from 
all  the  defects  that  he  despises  or  hates. 
Funnily  enough,  so  far  as  it  goes,  his  Ideal 
is  strangely  like  the  Ideal  of  the  gospels. 
Moreover,  it  Is  the  possession  of  this  Ideal 
that  is  the  Average  Man's  religion.  In  so  far 
as  he  has  one ;  so  that  one  would  expect  him 
to  be  some  sort  of  a  Christian.  So  he  is.  In 
a  rather  ineffective  way.  And  he  recognizes 
the  fact  by  calling  himself  "  C.  of  E."  when 
he  enlists. 

But  Is  the  Average  Man's  ideal  really 
much  like  the  ideal  of  the  gospels?     He  ad- 


An  Average  Man's  Beliefs  17 

mires  courage.  Is  courage  a  Christian  vir- 
tue? Surely.  The  only  fear  that  Christ 
countenanced  was  the  fear  of  those  who  have 
power  to  kill  the  soul.  The  faith  which 
Christ  preached  made  fear  an  impossibility. 
The  disciples  feared  the  storm  because  they 
had  not  faith.  Christ  did  not  fear  the  storm. 
The  disciples  were  afraid  of  the  Pharisees, 
the  Priests,  Herod,  public  opinion;  Jesus  was 
not.  He  had  faith;  they  had  it  not.  The 
disciples  were  anxious  about  ways  and  means. 
They  feared  starvation  and  nakedness. 
Jesus  did  not.  He  had  faith;  they  had  it 
not.  Jesus  Christ  feared  absolutely  noth- 
ing, because  He  had  faith  in  the  love  and 
power  of  God  the  Father,  and  He  felt  cer- 
tain that  as  long  as  He  loved  and  obeyed  His 
Father  no  real  harm  could  happen  to  Him. 
The  faith  of  Jesus  was  a  perfect  love  of 
the  good  God,  and  perfect  love  casteth  out 


1 8  The  Church  and  the  Man 

fear.  Courage  is  a  fundamental  Christian 
virtue.  Fear  is  the  first  false  god  from 
whose  power  the  gospel  frees  us. 

Generosity  and  practical  kindness  —  are 
these  Christian  virtues?  It  Is  hardly  neces- 
sary to  answer.  Jesus  was  described  as  a 
man  who  "  went  about  doing  good.''  If  the 
first  law  of  the  kingdom  was  to  love  God  with 
all  one's  faculties,  the  second  was  to  love 
one's  neighbour  as  oneself.  It  Is  more 
blessed  to  give  than  to  receive.  Do  to  others 
as  you  would  they  should  do  unto  you.  Love 
your  enemies  —  which  means  want  to  make 
them  your  friends;  want  them  to  alter,  so 
that  friendship  between  you  may  be  possible; 
pray  for  that.  Be  willing  to  give  anything 
—  even  your  life.  This  is  all  in  the  gospels, 
as  every  one  knows. 

What  about  single-minded  honesty?  Let 
your  yea  be  yea,  and  your  nay,  nay.  Seek 
the  kingdom,  and  let  other  things  follow; 


An  Average  Man's  Beliefs  19 

and  seeking  the  kingdom  means  seeking  for 
the  things  of  God  —  justice,  mercy,  love, 
truth.  Dishonesty  and  equivocation  are  al- 
ways the  fruit  either  of  fear  or  of  selfishness. 
.  The  man  who  has  the  courage  of  faith  and 
who  loves  his  neighbour  as  himself  will  never 
be  guilty  of  either. 

Persistence?  Be  not  weary  in  well-doing. 
Instability  is  incompatible  with  either  real 
faith  or  real  love. 

Was  ever  any  one  less  narrow-minded  than 
Christ?  He  feasted  with  publicans  and  sin- 
ners. He  healed  lepers.  He  forgave  har- 
lots. He  foretold  the  conversion  of  the 
Gentiles.  He  ridiculed  narrow  laws  and 
prejudices  at  every  turn.  You  cannot  be 
narrow  if  you  have  once  known  and  loved 
the  Heavenly  Father. 

As  for  "  swank  "  and  cant,  and  snobbish 
subservience  to  rank  and  wealth,  they  were 
the  very  things  that  Christ  loathed  and  fought 


20  The  Church  and  the  Man 

against  most  of  all.  When  the  disciples 
boasted,  He  set  a  child  In  their  midst,  as  an 
example  of  humility.  He  told  the  Pharisees 
that  their  self-satisfied  righteousness  was 
nothing  but  cant,  and  that  it  set  them  far 
further  from  the  kingdom  of  heaven  than 
any  amount  of  downright  sin. 

No,  there  is  not  a  single  feature  of  the 
Average  Man's  ideal  which  is  not  part  and 
parcel  of  the  ideal  which  Jesus  Christ  taught 
and  embodied.  And  once  you  have  under- 
stood His  point  of  view.  His  sense  of  perspec- 
tive, all  these  features  are  seen  to  be  neces- 
sary. Inevitable,  and  comprehensible.  Once 
realize  the  greatness  of  God,  as  Christ  real- 
ized and  taught  it,  and  the  littleness  of  man 
follows.  Once  realize  the  fatherly  love  of 
God,  as  Christ  realized  and  taught  it,  and 
the  greatness  of  man  follows  —  his  real 
greatness.  And  from  that  vision  of  the 
greatness  and  the  love  of  God  all  courage  and 


An  Average  Man's  Beliefs  21 

love  towards  men,  and  humility,  and  honesty, 
and  independence  follow  with  irrefutable 
logic. 

Now,  you  Average  Man,  how  Is  it  that, 
since  Christ  fulfils  and  embodies  and  explains 
^  your  ideal,  you  are  not  enrolled  under  His 
banner?  Why  not  range  yourself  under  the 
standard  of  the  Cross  with  the  rest  who  are 
trying  to  embody  Him? 

"  Why  quarrel  about  a  name,'^  you  say, 
"if  I  am  following  the  same  ideal?  Did 
not  Christ  Himself  say,  ^  He  that  is  not 
against  us  is  for  us  '  ?  " 

But  what  I  complain  about  Is  that  though 
you  have  an  ideal  you  don't  make  any  real 
attempt  to  follow  it  out.  Don't  you  real- 
ize that  your  talk  of  courage  is  all  humbug, 
and  that  you  are  actually  living  the  life  of 
a  toady  —  a  toady  to  convention  and  class 
prejudice  and  public  opinion?  Don't  you 
realize  that  your  talk  of  generosity  Is  all 


22  The  Church  and  the  Man 

cant,  and  that  you  are  actually  living  the 
most  selfish  life  imaginable,  thinking  of  noth- 
ing so  much  as  of  your  own  comfort  and 
position  and  reputation?  Don't  you  realize 
the  cruelty  of  your  profit-mongering  and 
your  immorality?  Don't  you  see  that  your 
pleasures  are  bestial,  and  that  your  morals 
are  dragging  down  the  whole  race?  Pull 
yourself  together.  If  you  believe  in  your 
ideal,  for  goodness  sake  try  to  follow  it  out. 
What?  You  don't  want  to  "  set  up  to  be 
good"?  You  know  you  can't  succeed,  do 
you?  What's  that?  However  much  you 
try,  death  and  fate  will  mock  you  in  the  end? 
Ah,  my  friend,  what  you  need  is  religion, 
after  all.  It  is  no  good  having  an  ideal  un- 
less you  are  an  optimist,  and  you  can't  be  a 
rational  optimist  without  believing  in  God. 
You  can't  believe  in  God?  Why,  man,  the 
very  fact  that  you  can't  make  a  decent  fist 
of  life  without  this  belief  in  God,  this  ra- 


An  Average  Man's  Beliefs  23 

tional  basis  of  optimism,  is  surely  a  sufficient 
proof  of  its  truth ! 

You  don't  see  that  you  are  any  worse  than 
the  average  Churchman,  and  you  don't  see 
that  going  to  church  is  going  to  bring  you 
any  nearer  to  your  ideal?  That  is  the  point, 
is  it?  Do  you  believe  in  Christ?  Yes.  Do 
you  believe  in  the  Church  which  is  His  body? 
No.  Well,  then,  join  the  Church  so  that 
you  may  be  in  a  position  to  improve  it ! 

You  won't?  I  know  one  reason,  O  aver- 
age man!  You  are  human,  you  have  pas- 
sions, you  have  given  way  to  them,  and  you 
don't  believe  in  your  ability  to  conquer  them. 
Yet  stay  and  consider.  In  Christianity  mar- 
riage is  a  holy  thing  —  the  consecration  to 
God's  service  of  God's  greatest  gift  to  men, 
the  power  of  creation:  a  holy  partnership  in 
which  the  Great  Giver  of  Life  is  a  third. 
Is  not  that  your  ideal,  too?  Don't  you 
agree  that  you  would  be  better  and  happier 


24  The  Church  and  the  Man 

if  you  tried  to  live  up  to  it?  If  so,  it  is  up 
to  you  to  try  to  live  up  to  your  ideal,  and 
to  be  pure  up  till  marriage  so  that  your 
marriage  may  be  really  holy.  It  is  a  poor 
thing  to  have  an  ideal  and  not  to  try  to  live 
up  to  it;  and,  mind  you,  this  is  all  that  Christ 
asks  of  you  —  to  go  on  trying  hopefully. 
You  very  likely  can't  succeed  right  away,  but 
if  you  go  on  trying  hopefully,  and  genuinely 
hating  your  failure,  you  are  a  Christian. 


CHAPTER  III 

THE  TROUBLES  OF  AN  AVERAGE  LAYMAN 

An  Average  Man  came  to  the  conclusion 
that  it  was  up  to  him  to  become  a  Churchman. 
Jesus  Christ  was  his  ideal  after  all.  If  he 
could  embody  even  a  little  bit  of  Jesus,  that 
was  good  enough.  So  he  came  to  Com- 
munion and  found  in  the  breaking  of  bread 
and  in  the  drinking  of  the  wine  the  symbols  of 
the  very  essence  of  his  faith.  He  knelt  and 
said,  "  Lord  Jesus,  I  want  to  be  a  bit  of 
Thee.  I  want  to  show  a  little  bit  of  Thee 
to  the  world.  I  want  to  offer  Thee  my  body 
to  be  a  member  of  Thy  Body,  that  it  may 
show  to  the  world  a  little  of  Thy  Spirit.  O 
Lord  Jesus,  it  is  a  wretched  thing  that  I 
offer  Thee.     Yet  Thou  canst  use  it  if  Thou 

25 


26  The  Church  and  the  Man 

wilt,  and  purify  it  for  Thy  purpose."  And 
the  Lord  Jesus  gave  to  him  bread  and  wine, 
and  said,  ^'  Dear  brother,  thy  gift  I  accept. 
So  long  as  thou  offerest  it,  I  will  receive  it, 
and  will  live  again  in  the  world  in  thee  and 
in  thy  brethren.  Take  this  bread,  it  is  My 
token  that  thou  art  a  member  of  My  body. 
Take  this  wine.  It  is  the  token  that  while 
thou  offerest  thyself  to  Me,  My  Spirit  shall 
live  in  thee,  and  show  itself  to  the  world." 
And  to  all  that  were  assembled  there  the 
Lord  said,  "  By  this  shall  all  men  know  that 
ye  are  My  disciples,  if  ye  have  love  one  to 
another."  And  they  all  went  their  ways,  and 
did  not  meet  till  the  following  Sunday. 

The  Average  Man  had  become  a  layman, 
and  he  was  at  once  profoundly  happy,  and 
profoundly  discontented.  On  the  one  hand 
he  was  clear  about  his  ideal.  He  was  try- 
ing to  follow  it,  and  finding  an  altogether  un- 
eixpected  joy   in   doing  so.     On   the   other 


Troubles  of  an  Average  Layman      27 

hand,  he  did  not  find  in  the  visible  and  or- 
ganized Church  that  fellowship,  that  straight- 
forward simplicity,  that  sure  help,  which  he 
had  been  led  to  expect. 

At  the  very  start  he  had  been  discouraged. 
It  was  found  that  after  all  he  had  never  been 
baptized.  At  first  he  was  rather  glad  of 
this.     He  said  as  much  to  the  parson. 

*' Padre,''  said  he.  *' I'm  glad  of  this. 
It's  a  chance  to  get  things  square.  I  want  to 
be  quite  clear  about  the  proposition  that  I 
am  taking  up.  I  want  to  stand  up  before  you 
and  my  witnesses,  and  to  say  quite  plainly 
to  them  that  I  want  to  fight  beneath  the 
Cross,  the  standard  of  Jesus  Christ;  that  I 
want  to  be  a  member  of  His  body,  and  to  do 
my  bit  towards  showing  Him  to  the  world. 
I  want  to  say  that  I  don't  believe  in  selfishness 
and  material  ambition,  and  that  I  do  believe 
in  goodness,  and  honesty,  and  love,  and 
freedom." 


28  The  Church  and  the  Man 

"  M'yes,"  said  the  parson.  "  We  shall 
have  to  use  the  service  for  the  baptism  of 
such  as  be  of  riper  years." 

"  What's  that?  "  asked  the  Average  Man 
in  alarm. 

*'  Here  it  is,"  said  the  parson,  handing 
him  a  prayer-book  open  at  the  place. 

The  Average  Man  began  to  read  it. 

"  I  say,"  he  protested.  "  Why  drag  in 
Noah  and  the  Red  Sea?  I  don't  think  I 
quite  believe  in  them,  you  know!  " 

"  That's  all  right,"  said  the  padre.  ''  You 
haven't  got  to." 

"  Well,  but  can't  you  leave  them  out  ?  It 
seems  to  make  the  thing  unreal  somehow." 

The  Average  Man  read  on. 

"  I  say,"  he  said  again.  "  This  is  awfully 
long-winded.  What  exactly  do  you  mean  by 
*  mystical  washing  away,'  *  spiritual  regen- 
eration,' *  elect  children,'  *  everlasting  salva- 
tion,' and  being  *  damned '  ?  " 


Troubles  of  an  Average  Layman      29 

"  Don't  you  worry  about  that,"  said  the 
parson.  "  The  service  is  an  old  one.  I  am 
satisfied  that  you  have  got  the  main  points 
right,  and  that  is  all  that  matters." 

"  But  can't  you  cut  them  out?  And  look 
here,  do  you  steadfastly  believe  that  Christ 
was  born  of  the  Virgin  Mary,  and  that  He 
went  down  into  Hell,  and  ascended  into 
Heaven,  and  that  He  will  come  to  judge 
the  quick  and  the  dead?  And  do  you  really 
believe  In  the  resurrection  of  the  flesh,  be- 
cause I  am  hanged  if  I  do?  " 

"  The  Church  has  always  affirmed  that 
the  Christ  was  born  of  a  virgin,"  said  the 
padre,  "  though  I  don't  really  feel  strongly 
about  this  point  of  doctrine.  As  for  going 
down  and  ascending  I  think  that  essentially 
I  mean  the  same  as  the  writer  of  the  creed, 
though  I  should  put  it  differently.  As  for 
the  second  coming  in  the  lifetime  of  the 
world,  I  believe  in  it  as  a  possibihty  rather 


30  The  Church  and  the  Man 

than  as  a  certainty.  I  certainly  believe  in  the 
survival  of  personality,  which  is  the  only 
important  thing  about  the  '  resurrection  of 
the  flesh.'  " 

"  That's  all  very  well,"  objected  the  Aver- 
\  age  Man,  "  but  here  am  I,  at  the  most  im- 
portant moment  of  my  life,  when  I  am  try- 
ing to  make  a  clean  start  in  a  new  sort  of 
life  altogether,  and  I  have  got  to  make  a 
public  and  solemn  confession  of  faith  with 
all  sorts  of  mental  reservations.  I  don't 
like  it.  Why  can't  I  say  straight  out  what 
you  and  I  really  do  believe?  " 

"  You've  got  to  obey  the  rules,  that's  all," 
said  the  padre.  *'  And  they  aren't  up  to 
date." 

"  Well,  I  suppose  I  must  equivocate  a  lit- 
tle to  obtain  so  great  a  fellowship,"  said  the 
Average  Man.  "  But  I  must  say,  I  wish 
it  wasn't  necessary." 

And  as  time  went  on  he  kept  on  running 


Troubles  of  an  Average  Layman     31 

up  against  the  same  difficulty.  The  Church 
services,  instead  of  being  a  help  to  him,  con- 
tinually worried  him  by  their  apparent  Ir- 
relevance and  insincerity.  The  preaching 
that  he  heard  generally  seemed  off  the  point 
too.  The  choir  worried  him;  because  it 
"  rendered  "  the  service  in  a  way  which  made 
it  Impossible  for  him  to  join  in,  and  because 
he  knew  that  It  consisted  of  choirmen  who 
were  only  interested  in  the  musical  aspect 
of  the  service,  and  of  boys  who  weren't  In- 
terested at  all.  He  felt  that  one  ought  not 
to  have  to  pay  men  to  praise  God  for  one. 
But  what  worried  him  more  than  anything 
was  that  he  had  no  friends  among  the  con- 
gregation. He  felt  that  this  was  absolutely 
wrong,  and  that  as  fellow  members  of 
Christ's  body  they  ought  to  be  united.  All 
men  should  know  that  they  were  His  dis- 
ciples by  the  fact  that  they  loved  one  an- 
other.    Yet  most  of  them  he  simply  could 


32  The  Church  and  the  Man 

not  love.  He  knew  them  as  reputable  men; 
but  they  were  men  who  kept  themselves  to 
themselves,  priding  themselves  on  their  re- 
spectability in  a  manner  which  seemed  al- 
most Pharisaical.  One  or  two  of  them  he 
knew  were  hard  employers,  who  made  a  liv- 
ing by  paying  their  men  as  little  as  possible, 
and  working  them  as  hard  as  possible.  The 
communion  of  saints  seemed  to  be  lacking. 
The  corporate  embodiment  of  the  Lord 
Jesus  seemed  to  be  in  abeyance.  Such  keen- 
ness as  did  exist  seemed  to  centre  round  cer- 
tain committees  and  meetings,  where  little 
matters  of  procedure  and  ritual,  which 
seemed  to  the  Average  Man  of  infinite  unim- 
portance, were  debated  with  great  heat. 

And  all  the  time  he  did  need  the  fellow- 
ship of  his  brethren  so  badly.  For  he  soon 
found  that,  however  much  he  might  like 
his  comrades  who  were  not  Churchmen,  there 
was  now  a  gulf  between  them.     The  average 


Troubles  of  an  Average  Layman     33 

joke  was  a  joke  that  he  simply  could  not 
laugh  at  and  be  loyal  to  his  Master.  The 
average  amusement  was  such  that  he  simply 
could  not  go  to  it.  These  jokes  and  amuse- 
ments were  not  clean.  They  were  poison- 
ous. They  degraded  man  and  woman  to  the 
level  of  the  beast,  and  he  had  determined  to 
regard  them  as  the  children  of  God.  So  he 
found  himself  not  disliked,  not  persecuted, 
but  just  left  out,  and  that  by  his  own  will. 
It  was  hard.  He  was  no  longer  the  Aver- 
age Man,  and  at  times  he  almost  wished  he 
were.  Being  a  Churchman  did  not  make  him 
feel  self-righteous.  He  knew  that  God  had 
called  him  to  follow  a  higher  ideal  than  the 
rest,  and  that  he  was  to  be  judged  hence- 
forth by  a  higher  standard;  and  while  he 
thanked  God  for  that  high  calling,  at  times  he 
felt  terribly  lonely  and  sore  in  need  of  help. 
The  Church  had  endued  him  with  a  new 
hunger;  but  It  failed  to  satisfy  It. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE    GOSPEL  AND  THE    CHURCH 

The  fact  is  that  the  gospel  for  the  In- 
dividual is  a  simple  matter  to  understand, 
while  the  Church  is  a  very  complicated  affair. 
The  layman  in  the  last  chapter  had  no  diffi- 
culty in  understanding  the  practical  meaning 
of  the  profession  that  he  had  undertaken.  It 
was  simply  that  he  had  to  try  to  look  at  every- 
thing from  a  new  point  of  view,  the  point  of 
view  of  Jesus  Christ,  a  point  of  view  from 
which  the  greatness  of  God  filled  the  land- 
scape, while  the  individual  disappeared  into 
insignificance  except  in  so  far  as  he  stood  out 
in  the  light  of  God's  love.  So  things  tem- 
poral suddenly  became  very  unimportant, 
while  things  eternal  loomed  large.     The  ef- 

34 


The  Gospel  and  the  Church         35 

feet  of  this  point  of  view  on  the  man  who 
had  assimilated  it  could  be  easily  foretold. 
In  proportion  as  the  assimilation  was  com- 
plete he  would  approach  more  nearly  to  the 
ideal  which  is  the  ideal  of  every  wholesome 
man,  and  which  was  the  ideal  taught  and 
exemplified  by  Christ.  For  the  individual, 
we  repeat,  the  gospel  is  plain  enough.  It  is 
simply  the  imitation  of  Christ,  and  there  is 
no  real  doubt  about  the  manner  of  man  that 
Christ  was. 

But  the  Church  is  concerned  with  a  host 
of  other  questions,  which  so  occupy  it  that 
there  is  hardly  any  time  left  for  the  gospel 
The  Church  is  busy  with  literary  and  histor 
ical  criticism,  comparative  religion  and  aa 
thropology,  cosmogony,  embryology,  psy 
chology,  metaphysics,  apostolic  succession 
symbolic  theology,  mediaevalism,  modernism 
ritualism,  protestantism,  preservation  of  con- 
tinuity,  adaptation   to   modern  needs,    rela 


36  The  Church  and  the  Man 

tions  with  the  State,  finance,  socialism,  re- 
union, organized  philanthropy,  foreign  mis- 
sions, and  countless  other  questions  of  ap- 
parently vital  and  pressing  importance. 
Moreover,  the  Church  is  "  all  of  a  muddle." 
It  can't  see  its  way  through.  It  is  rent  at 
every  turn  by  violent  antagonisms  within  the 
fold.  On  every  question  men  are  calling 
each  other  "  obscurantists,"  "  traitors," 
"  heretics,"  "  schismatics,"  "  Laodiceans," 
*'  fanatics,"  and  so  on.  It  is  very  certain  that 
in  this,  as  in  other  ages  of  the  history  of  the 
Church,  outsiders  would  be  puzzled  to  recog- 
nize the  disciples  of  Christ  by  the  love  that 
they  bear  towards  one  another. 

Something  is  wrong,  and  an  ever-increas- 
ing number  of  men  and  women  within  the 
Church  are  feeling  that  all  this  strife  and 
controversy  is  beside  the  point;  that  in  it  the 
gospel  is  lost  sight  of;  that  what  we  want 
to  do  is  just  to  drop  all  these  questions,  and 


The  Gospel  and  the  Church         37 

to  get  back  to  the  main  point,  which  Is,  after 
all,  to  embody  Christ.  We  know  that  some 
people  will  go  on  wrangling,  but  why  should 
every  simple  child  that  comes  to  school  to 
learn  how  to  be  a  child  of  God  be  dragged 
Into  the  controversy?  Why  should  every 
simple  workman  who  comes  to  Church  to 
worship  God  be  Involved  In  these  unprofitable 
complications?  There  Is  no  getting  out  of 
it,  they  are  involved.  Every  child  who  is 
taught  the  Book  of  Genesis  as  part  of  his 
religious  education  Is  predestined  to  an  even- 
tual plunge  into  the  murky  waters  of  con- 
troversy. Every  workman  who  comes  to 
Church  and  sings  the  present  psalter  and 
listens  to  the  present  lectlonary  and  repeats 
the  present  creeds  is  going  to  have  his  faith 
complicated  by  some  of  these  unnecessary 
and  unedlfying  wrangles. 

What  are  we  to  do  —  we  who  only  want 
to  get  the  main  issue  plain?     We  are  con- 


38  The  Church  and  the  Man 

fronted  by  three  alternatives.  The  first  is 
to  initiate  a  campaign  for  the  reformation 
of  the  Church  and  the  revision  of  its  meth- 
ods and  textbooks  in  the  interests  of  sim- 
pHcity  and  of  the  coming  of  the  kingdom. 
That  means  that  we  plunge  into  the  sea  of 
controversy,  and  try  to  obtain  the  mastery. 
Could  we  but  have  a  free  hand  we  are  sure 
that  we  could  reform  the  Church!  Ah  yes; 
but  so  are  all  our  brother  zealots  of  the  op- 
posing camps.  They  are  all  in  earnest. 
They  are  all  sure  that  they  are  right.  All 
that  any  of  them  wants  is  a  free  hand.  I 
confess  that  in  former  days  I  have  pinned 
my  faith  to  such  a  campaign;  but  lately  I 
have  begun  to  doubt  whether  any  godly  re- 
sult can  issue  from  this  fratricidal  strife. 
Moreover,  we  are,  after  all,  only  a  section  of 
the  Church.  Let  us  be  humble  enough  to 
admit  that  if  we  had  a  free  hand  in  revising 
the  Church  of  today,  a  new  generation  would 


The  Gospel  and  the  Church         39 

demand  to  revise  our  revision  twenty  years 
hence.  I  think  that  it  is  really  almost  neces- 
sary that  the  Church  should  be  something  of 
a  compromise,  and  somewhat  behind  the 
times. 

The  second  alternative  is  to  cut  ourselves 
off  from  the  Church,  and  its  strife  and  cor- 
ruption, and  to  start  a  new  Church  of  our 
own,  which  shall  be  pure  and  holy  indeed. 
Alack,  my  brethren,  how  many  have  done  this 
very  thing  in  the  last  hundred  years,  and,  with 
what  result?  Why,  narrowness,  poverty  of 
life  and  pride,  till  they  too  have  become  cor- 
rupt and  moribund.  No,  brethren,  the  life 
of  Christ  is  in  His  body  the  Church,  for  all 
its  infidelity.  We  cannot  make  Him  a  new 
body,  other  than  that  which  He  has  chosen, 
for  His  Spirit  will  not  dwell  therein. 

The  third  alternative  seems  to  me  to  be 
the  right  one,  and  it  is  to  take  full  advan- 
tage of  the  liberty  that  is  allowed  within  the 


40  The  Church  and  the  Man 

Church.  I  have  in  mind  a  little  settlement 
in  one  of  our  great  cities,  where  a  few  uni- 
versity men  and  many  men  of  the  place  have 
grown  into  a  brotherhood  which  is,  as  it 
seems  to  me,  very  real,  very  Christian,  very 
pure  in  its  ideals,  very  simple  in  its  teaching 
and  worship  and  manner  of  life,  and  which 
combines  a  very  real  unity  with  the  English 
Church  with  a  very  real  freedom  from  un- 
necessary complications.  The  premises  of 
the  settlement  consist  of  a  central  house, 
wjiere  the  secretary  and  a  house-keeper  live. 
The  house  contains  a  common-room,  dining- 
room,  chapel,  and  bath-room  which  are  free 
to  all  members  of  the  committee  of  the  men's 
clubs,  and  the  "  officers  "  of  the  boys'  clubs. 
Besides  this  house  there  are  two  men's  clubs 
and  four  boys'  clubs.  The  constitution  is 
extremely  democratic,  and  remarkably  elastic 
in  every  way.  Short  prayers  close  each  club 
every  evening.     On  Sunday  there  is  a  sim- 


The  Gospel  and  the  Church         41 

pie  and  elastic  service  in  each  boys'  club,  and 
an  equally  simple  service  in  Church  for  the 
men.  Once  a  month  there  is  corporate  Com- 
munion in  the  church,  followed  by  a  simple 
breakfast  taken  in  common,  and  paid  for  by 
those  who  attend.  Every  Sunday  evening 
there  is  a  quite  indescribable  service  in  the 
chapel  for  the  '*  officers  "  and  communicants, 
which  alternates  according  to  circumstances 
between  a  Bible  class,  a  prayer  meeting,  and 
a  fellowship  of  silence,  and  is  always  a  mix- 
ture of  the  three.  By  agreement  with  the 
rector  of  the  parish  the  candidates  for  Con- 
firmation are  prepared  under  arrangements 
made  by  the  "  warden,"  who  is  always  a  lay- 
man, and  seldom  a  professional  theologian. 
Of  course  I  am  describing  pre-war  days. 
The  result  was.  In  my  opinion,  quite  ex- 
traordinary. The  brotherhood  was  con- 
tinually faced  with  crises,  such  as  the  loss  of 
its  indispensable  members;  yet  in  the  event 


42  The  Church  and  the  Man 

no  one  was  found  to  be  indispensable.  Mem- 
bers have  been  scattered  broadcast  over  the 
world,  yet  I  know  of  hardly  one  who  has 
forgotten,  or  who,  having  once  been  a  com- 
municant, has  since  ceased  to  be  one.  When 
the  war  came  it  seemed  as  if  the  brother- 
hood would  have  to  be  for  the  time  dis- 
banded, yet  it  is,  so  far  as  the  junior  clubs 
are  concerned,  more  flourishing  than  ever, 
though  almost  without  personnel  to  manage 
it;  while  a  monthly  news  and  correspondence 
sheet  shows  that  there  is  hardly  a  member 
who  does  not  feel  that  absence  has  even 
strengthened  the  invisible  bond  that  unites 
him  to  his  brethren  and  his  spiritual  home. 

This  is  just  one  example  of  the  way  in 
which  in  loyalty  to  the  English  Church  a  free 
society  may  grow  up  and  flourish,  and  with 
the  benediction  of  bishop  and  rector  unite 
men  in  a  simple  faith  such  as  is  almost  im- 
possible in  the  ordinary  official  parochial  or- 


The  Gospel  and  the  Church         43 

ganization.  By  means  of  such  groups  within 
the  Church,  ideals  may  be  pursued  and  de- 
veloped and  justified  without  schism  or  dis- 
loyalty, without  the  danger  of  narrowness 
that  comes  from  complete  separation.  By 
remaining  within  the  fold  they  both  nourish 
and  are  nourished  by  the  Church,  without 
losing  any  reasonable  degree  of  freedom. 
Further,  it  is  remarkable  that  in  the  particular 
instance  described  above  the  relations  be- 
tween the  brotherhood  and  the  official 
Church  have  steadily  grown  in  cordiality. 
Suspicion,  which  was  rife  at  first,  has  died. 
It  is,  I  am  convinced,  by  using  the  free- 
dom of  the  Church  to  pursue  our  ideals  that 
we  shall  both  avoid  the  pitfalls  of  separat- 
ism and  commend  our  ideas  to  the  Church. 
It  is  not  by  talking,  but  by  being  and  doing 
that  truth  is  made  known,  and  purged  of 
error.  Had  Jesus  Christ  been  but  a  prophet 
there  would  have  been  no  Christian  Church 


44  The  Church  and  the  Man 

today.  It  is  because  He  was  the  Son,  and 
because  He  lived  and  died  perfectly,  that 
He  is  our  Lord  and  Master  now.  And  so 
with  His  disciples,  it  is  not  by  controversy  or 
organization,  but  by  holy  living  and  holy 
dying  that  they  will  purify  His  Church,  and 
fill  the  world  with  the  knowledge  of  God. 


CHAPTER  V 

METHODS   AND   WEAPONS 

Supposing  that  a  new  movement  did 
spring  up  within  the  Church,  and  that  men 
and  women  who  felt  that  they  were  clear 
about  the  main  issue  did  form  groups  within 
the  Church  where  they  could  work  for  their 
ideals  with  loyalty  and  reasonable  freedom, 
what  should  be  their  methods  and  weapons  ? 
To  begin  with,  it  is  probably  essential  that 
the  movement  should  not  be  organized  or 
centralized.  At  the  present  juncture  con- 
tralization  would  mean  controversy  and  loss 
of  freedom.  We  want  to  keep  out  the  peo- 
ple who  have  a  passion  for  regulation  and 
diplomacy.  We  want  plain  humble  effort, 
with  any  amount  of  variety  and  experiment. 
45 


46  The  Church  and  the  Man 

We  don't  want  notoriety  or  advertisement. 
We  don't  want  to  be  labelled.  We  don't 
want  to  be  dragged  into  the  regions  of  crit- 
icism and  controversy.  We  want  to  be  the 
leaven  that  works  unseen. 

In  the  matter  of  worship  and  life  and  rela- 
tions with  the  parish  church,  there  must 
necessarily  be  infinite  elasticity,  to  correspond 
with  an  infinite  variety  of  conditions.  In 
the  matter  of  teaching,  if  we  confine  our- 
selves to  the  practical  issue  there  will  be  lit- 
tle temptation  to  divergence.  The  gospel 
in  its  practical  bearings  is  plain  enough.  All 
that  we  do  want  is  a  literature.  This  litera- 
ture must  not  be  prepared  or  issued  by  au- 
thority. That  would  immediately  arouse 
suspicions  and  drag  us  into  the  arena  of  con- 
troversy. In  character  the  essentials  are 
that  it  should  be  positive  and  simple.  Too 
much  time  and  energy  have  already  been 
spent  in  attacking  what  is  false.     What  is 


Methods  and  Weapons  47 

now  needed  is  the  promulgation  of  what  is 
true.  And  the  ultimate  test  of  truth  for 
the  ordinary  man  is  experiment.  Anything 
that  can  be  tested  by  experiment  is  vital. 
Anything  that  cannot  be  tested  by  experi- 
ment can  be  left  on  one  side.  Was  Christ 
born  of  a  virgin?  We  cannot  test  that  by 
experiment,  and  therefore  it  is  not  vital  to 
the  ordinary  man.  Leave  it  to  the  Church. 
Is  Christ  alive?  That  is  a  matter  that  can 
be  tested.  It  is  vital.  Assume  Him  to  be 
alive,  and  see  whether  it  works.  Does  He 
really  live  in  us  if  we  offer  Him  our  bodies 
for  His  dwelling  place?  Try  to  see.  This 
is  vital.  Is  love  really  stronger  than  fear? 
Is  it  really  true  that  humihty  and  unselfish- 
ness are  more  important  than  wealth  and 
power?  Is  it  true  that  life  is  eternal?  As- 
sume these  propositions  true,  and  if  in  do- 
ing so  you  find  a  new  happiness  and  peace 
yours,  the  balance  of  probability  is  in  their 


48  The  Church  and  the  Man 

favour.  And  if  other  men  and  women  see 
that  the  fruits  of  your  life  are  good,  they 
will  come  and  ask  you  to  teach  them  too  how 
to  be  happy  and  useful. 

This  is  the  new  apologetic,  which  is  as 
old  as  Christianity.  Not  controversy  but 
demonstration,  not  logic  but  power.  In  the 
long  run  it  is  the  only  apologetic  that  counts. 

But  in  talking  of  literature,  what  of  the 
Bible?  There  again  the  same  test  must  be 
apphed.  We  want  as  much  of  the  Bible  as 
can  help  us  practically.  We  don't  want  any 
of  the  stuffing,  or  of  the  parts  that  are  going 
to  land  us  in  controversy.  We  want  a  short- 
ened Bible  for  the  use  of  plain  people,  and 
sooner  or  later  some  one  will  have  to  take 
this  task  in  hand.  Probably  there  will  be 
many  experiments  in  this  direction.  Parts 
of  the  Bible  which  are  of  infinite  value  to 
the  educated  man  are  quite  useless  to  the 
workman  or  the  child.     But  in  the  Bible  is 


Methods  and  Weapons  49 

the  kernel  of  the  faith,  and  we  have  got  to 
dig  it  out  and  make  it  easy  of  access  to  all 
who  need  it. 

There  is  one  other  way  in  which  in  some 
places  it  might  be  possible  for  us  to  help  the 
Church.  There  is  little  doubt  that  one  of 
the  chief  difficulties  of  the  Church  lies  in  the 
traditional  status  of  the  clergy.  The  par- 
son's job  is  such  that  it  does  not  bring  him 
into  very  close  touch  with  the  ordinary  lay- 
men of  his  parish.  Very  often  they  fail  to 
understand  each  other.  It  has  been  sug- 
gested in  a  certain  parish  that  one  or  two 
laymen  who  have  long  worked  In  the  parish 
in  a  more  or  less  independent  fashion  should 
cement  the  union  between  their  work  and 
that  of  the  parish  church  by  becoming  dea- 
cons for  Sunday  duty,  while  still  continuing 
to  earn  their  livings  during  the  week  by  their 
civilian  occupations.  Such  men,  it  is  thought, 
would  be  a  valuable  link  between  the  clergy 


50  The  Church  and  the  Man 

and  the  laity,  and  the  experiment  might  be 
worth  trying  in  some  places. 

Above  all,  we  must  not  aim  at  finality. 
This  movement  of  which  we  have  spoken  may 
develop,  it  may  be  maturing  even  now,  it 
may  never  begin;  but  If  it  does  mature,  it 
must  be  content  to  be  fike  leaven,  working 
unseen,  and  ready  and  glad  to  be  absorbed 
more  and  more  Into  the  life  of  the  whole. 
Unlike  a  separatist  movement,  it  must  aim 
at  rendering  itself  unnecessary.  Its  ultimate 
object  must  be  its  own  disappearance. 


CHAPTER  VI 

REVELATION  AND   COMMON   SENSE 

The  word  "  faith  "  is  made  to  cover  a 
great  deal  of  timidity  and  a  great  deal  of 
laziness.  Young  people  who  ask  questions 
about  theology  are  told  that  they  must  re- 
frain, and  accept  by  an  exercise  of  ''  faith  " 
what  they  cannot  hope  to  understand.  That 
is  one  reason  why  young  people  who  have 
had  ^'  a  Christian  education  "  so  seldom  know 
anything  about  Christianity.  There  are  a 
great  many  doctrines  which  are  not  only 
highly  agreeable  to  common  sense,  and  eas- 
ily understood,  but  are  of  absolutely  vital 
practical  importance,  and  yet  hardly  any  one 
attempts  to  understand  them  because  they 
have  always  been  taught  to  accept  them  in 
51 


52  The  Church  and  the  Man 

"  faith  "  instead  of  asking  questions  about 
them. 

To  begin  with,  the  question  of  whether 
there  is  a  God  or  not,  is  one  which  Christian 
teachers  are  often  very  unwilling  to  discuss. 
They  feel  that  intellectually  the  case  for  the 
existence  of  God  is  a  weak  one.  They  say 
that  there  is  only  one  thing  to  do,  and  that  is 
to  make  an  effort  of  faith  and  believe  it. 
Consequently  lots  of  people  go  away  with 
the  idea  that  it  does  not  really  matter  very 
much  whether  they  believe  that  God  exists 
or  not,  as  long  as  they  try  to  "  play  the 
game."  Yet  really  the  question  is  one  which 
should  be  absolutely  of  vital  moment  to 
every  man.  If  there  is  a  God  he  must  look 
at  life  in  one  way,  and  if  there  is  not  he  must 
look  at  it  in  another.  His  whole  attitude 
towards  life  should  vary  according  to  the 
answer  that  he  gives  to  this  question.  For 
if  there  is  a  God  the  evidence  for  His  exist- 


Revelation  and  Common  Sense       53 

ence  is  found,  not  In  antiquity,  but  in  the 
present-day  man.  The  real  question  is, 
*'  What  is  man?  "  If  a  man  really  has  rea- 
son and  will-power  and  conscience  —  all  the 
qualities  which  appear  to  distinguish  him 
from  the  mere  creature  of  impulse  and  in- 
stinct —  then  they  must  have  come  from 
somewhere.  They  must  either  be  latent  In 
nature,  or  they  must  have  come  from  some 
Being  outside  of  nature  who  possesses  them. 
In  other  words,  either  nature  must  have  a 
divine  origin,  or  man  must  be  the  child,  not 
only  of  nature  his  mother,  but  also  of  God 
His  father.  In  either  case  God  exists.  But 
if  man's  reason  and  conscience  and  will- 
power are  not  real;  if  they  have  no  effective 
existence;  if  they  are,  as  has  been  said,  no 
more  than  the  by-products  of  a  blind,  insen- 
state,  conscienceless  process,  bearing  much  the 
same  relation  to  that  process  that  the  whir- 
ring sound  of  the  wheels  of  a  piece  of  ma- 


54  The  Church  and  the  Man 

chinery  bears  to  the  machinery,  having  as 
little  significance,  and  as  little  practical  ef- 
fect, then  there  is  probably  no  God.  The 
fact  is  that  if  a  man  is  determined  to  take 
his  will  and  reason  and  conscience  seriously, 
he  is  implicitly  assenting  to  the  proposition 
that  God  exists,  while  if  he  decides  to  adopt  a 
flippant,  pessimistic,  sceptical,  invertebrate, 
jelly-fish  sort  of  attitude  towards  life,  he  is 
implicitly  denying  the  existence  of  God.  Un- 
less there  is  a  God,  goodness  and  generosity 
and  nobility  and  heroism  are  mere  names 
without  any  real  meaning.  They  are 
dreams,  vanity,  nonsense.  Few  men  will  be 
willing  to  regard  them  as  such,  for  to  do  so  is 
to  deprive  Hfe  of  all  its  interest  and  meaning. 
The  theory  of  psychology  which  does  not 
give  a  meaning  to  life  as  we  have  to  live  It  is 
not  likely  to  commend  itself  to  us  as  likely 
to  be  true,  however  academically  logical  It 
may  be. 


Revelation  and  Common  Sense       55 

Equally,  the  doctrine  of  the  incarnation  is 
agreeable  to  common  sense.  We  human  be- 
ings may  be  *'  spiritual,"  but  it  is  quite  im- 
possible for  us  to  understand  or  perceive  the 
spiritual  unless  we  can  establish  contact  with 
it  through  the  medium  of  our  physical  senses. 
Just  as  we  see  electricity  revealed  in  its  ef- 
fects on  matter,  though  the  stuff  itself  eludes 
our  senses,  so  we  can  only  understand  and 
perceive  the  divine  Spirit  in  so  far  as  He  is 
revealed  in  His  effects  on  physical  beings.  It 
is,  we  have  argued,  in  man,  the  most  highly 
developed  of  Nature's  children,  that  we  see 
the  only  clear  and  convincing  evidence  of  the 
existence  of  the  spiritual  and  of  God.  So 
too  it  is  in  man,  and  in  the  most  perfect  of 
men,  that  we  shall  see  the  fullest  revelation 
of  God,  if  we  see  Him  at  all.  In  fact,  the 
most  perfect  man  is  necessarily  the  fullest 
revelation  of  God  that  we  could  possibly  un- 
derstand.    By  His   freedom   from   all   the 


56  The  Church  and  the  Man 

fears  and  meannesses  that  degrade  other 
men,  by  His  peerless  spiritual  liberty,  we 
acclaim  the  Christ  as  that  most  perfect  Man, 
that  fullest  possible  revelation  of  God  in  the 
only  terms  that  we  mortals  can  understand. 
So,  again,  the  "  mystical  union  "  between 
Christ  and  His  Church  is  not  nearly  so  hard 
to  understand  as  the  difficult  words  make  one 
think.  If  men  are  still  to  know  God  revealed 
in  Christ,  Christ  must  have  a  body  through 
which  to  reveal  Himself  to  men.  We  can 
only  know  other  men  through  their  self-ex- 
pression in  their  bodies,  and  we  can  only 
know  Christ  through  His  self-expression  in 
a  body.  But  there  is  no  man  living  who  can 
show  His  wonderfully  many-sided  freedom 
and  power  to  men.  Yet  each  can  show  some 
part  of  Him.  So,  each  showing  a  part,  the 
Church  corporate  should  show  the  whole,  if 
the  different  members  are  really  united  in 
spirit. 


Revelation  and  Comntori  Sense       57 

Again,  In  the  same  way  the  mystery  of 
Holy  Communion  becomes  clear.  We  offer 
our  bodies  to  Christ,  that  He  may  take  them 
and  show  in  each  some  part  of  Himself;  and 
the  bread  and  wine  are  the  age-long  pledge 
that  what  we  offer  He  accepts.  We  pledge 
ourselves  to  be  loyal  to  Him  and  to  one  an- 
other, and  to  combine  to  show  the  spirit  of 
Christ  to  the  world.  So  explained,  the  serv- 
ice of  Holy  Communion  is  clearly  seen  to 
contain  the  very  epitome  of  our  Christian 
faith  and  hope  and  duty.  It  is  there  at  the 
altar  that  we  perceive,  most  plainly  and  suc- 
cinctly set  forth,  just  what  it  means  to  try  to 
be  a  Christian,  and  just  where  we  are  to  look 
for  help.  Yet  how  many  candidates  for 
Confirmation  fail  to  understand  that  Holy 
Communion  is  anything  but  a  "  Holy  Mys- 
tery," incomprehensible  and  almost  magical! 

Priestly  absolution,  again,  is  very  rational 
when  it  is  properly  understood,  and  very  com- 


58  The  Church  and  the  Man 

forting  too.  Yet  there  are  many  who  hon- 
estly believe  that  we  hold  the  almost  blas- 
phemous doctrine  that  without  the  pronounce- 
ment of  absolution  by  the  priest,  God  does 
not  forgive!  What  is  the  truth?  Why, 
simply  that  Christ  declared  that  as  soon  as  a 
sinner  repented  and  tried  to  amend,  God  for- 
gave him.  Christ  announced  this  as  a  fact, 
and  because  men  trusted  that  Christ  was  the 
Son  of  God  they  believed  Him,  and  took 
advantage  of  God's  forgiveness.  Christ  still 
proclaims  this  fact  through  His  new  Body 
the  Church,  and  the  members  of  that  Body 
whose  function  It  is  to  make  that  declaration 
In  His  name  are  the  priests. 

Even  the  mystery  of  the  Holy  Trinity  Is 
not  repugnant  to  reason  nor  wholly  Incom- 
prehensible If  It  Is  explained  historically. 
As  a  fact  of  history,  the  first  Christians 
stated  that  they  believed  in  the  Father  and 
In  the  Son  and  In  the  Holy  Spirit.     Why? 


Revelation  and  Common  Sense       59 

Because  of  their  experience.  Peter  first 
learnt  the  love  of  the  Father  through  know- 
ing the  Son;  but  it  was  not  till  the  Holy- 
Spirit  entered  him  and  transformed  him  that 
the  coward  became  infinitely  brave,  and  the 
ambitious  follower  of  the  Messiah  became 
the  self-forgetful  apostle  of  the  gospel  of 
salvation,  Peter  believed  in  one  God;  but 
he  had  known  Him  through  two  revelations, 
the  revelation  in  Jesus  Christ,  and  the  revela- 
tion in  his  own  transformation  of  character. 
So  nothing  would  satisfy  Peter's  disciples 
but  a  belief  in  one  God  and  in  the  three  Per- 
sons who  were  the  revelation  of  that  God. 
The  doctrine  of  the  Holy  Trinity  was  the 
creation,  not  of  a  subtle,  philosophic  mind, 
but  of  plain  men  who  had  had  a  certain  ex- 
perience, and  who  refused  to  accept  any  ex- 
planation of  that  experience  which  did  not 
fit  in  with  and  allow  for  the  facts  as  they 
had  known  them. 


6o  The  Church  and  the  Man 

Over  and  over  again  one  finds  that  the 
Church  in  her  teaching  is  lacking  in  sim- 
plicity, in  the  courage  to  try  to  understand 
her  heritage,  in  the  realization  that  her  doc- 
trines that  have  been  handed  down  from  the 
earliest  days  are  not  mere  arbitrary  and 
mysterious  revelations  to  be  accepted  with 
an  irrational  and  uncomprehending  assent, 
but  doctrines  pregnant  with  vital  meaning 
for  life,  and  destined  to  revolutionize  the 
whole  outlook  and  character  of  the  man  who 
tries  to  understand  and  believe  and  apply 
them. 

It  is  very  much  the  same  with  the  Chris- 
tian ethic.  Only  too  often  the  practical 
words  of  Christ,  which  were  meant  to  de- 
fine for  us  our  attitude  towards  our  fellow 
men,  are  dismissed  as  a  kind  of  idealism  only 
meant  for  a  better  world;  and  this  is  often 
simply  because  the  teachers  of  the  Church 
have  not  the  courage  to  apply  common  sense 


Revelation  and  Common  Sense       6i 

to  their  interpretation  of  these  sayings. 
When  Christ  said,  "  Love  your  enemies," 
He  meant  it  literally.  He  did  not  mean, 
*'  slobber  over  them."  He  did  not  mean, 
"  condone  their  evil  deeds."  But  He  did 
mean,  "  wish  them  to  be  your  friends." 
Christ  loved  the  Pharisees  as  individuals, 
not  for  what  they  were,  but  for  what  they 
might  be.  He  showed  His  love,  not  by  shut- 
ting His  eyes  to  their  hypocrisy  and  pride,  not 
by  calling  them  "  dear  brothers,"  but  by  do- 
ing all  He  could  to  make  them  dissatisfied 
with  themselves,  so  that  they  might  become 
different,  and  so  that  they  might  become  His 
friends.  So  we  should  love  the  Germans, 
not  by  letting  them  do  evil  and  shutting  our 
eyes  to  it,  not  by  being  blind  to  their  hideous 
cruelty  and  lust  for  power;  but  by  doing  all 
we  can  to  alter  their  attitude.  Love  must 
be  wise.  After  the  war  we  must  be  ready  to 
be  generous  at  the  right  moment ;  but  it  were 


62   *        The  Church  and  the  Man 

a  very  mistaken  love  to  forget,  even  where 
one  is  ready  to  forgive.  Even  God  does  not 
forgive  the  Impenitent  sinner.  To  do  so 
were  to  condone  his  crimes. 

Again,  consider  that  other  vexed  question, 
the  question  of  the  sexual  union  of  men  and 
women.  How  often  Christ's  words  are  re- 
garded as  a  mere  arbitrary  commandment, 
and  how  seldom  does  any  one  apply  his  com- 
mon sense  to  interpret  them.  Yet  Christ's 
point  of  view  is  easy  to  understand.  *'  What 
God  hath  joined  together,  let  no  man  put 
asunder."  "  He  that  looketh  on  a  woman 
to  lust  after  her  hath  committed  adultery 
with  her  already  in  his  heart."  Sexual  love 
among  animals  may  well  be  a  matter  of 
physical  instinct,  for  the  resulting  beings  are 
beings  which  shall  be  guided  by  instinct. 
But  the  children  of  men  and  women  are  not 
children  of  nature,  guided  solely  by  physical 
instinct.     They  are,  according  to  Christ,  po- 


Revelation  and  Common  Sense       6^ 

tential  children  of  God.  Therefore  a  man 
and  woman  must  regard  their  marriage  as  a 
holy  thing,  for  which  they  are  responsible  to 
God,  since  they  are  to  bring  into  the  world 
children  for  Him  as  well  as  for  themselves. 
The  crying  need  at  present  Is  for  the 
Church  to  realize  the  reasonableness  and 
the  simplicity  of  her  gospel,  and  not  to  be 
afraid  of  explaining  it  to  boys  and  girls  and 
men  and  women  In  a  simple  and  practical 
way.  We  want  fewer  long  words,  less 
philosophy,  less  mystery,  more  simple  state- 
ment of  vital  and  practical  truth. 


CHAPTER  VII 

THE    CHURCH  AND    HUMAN   RELATIONS 

Doctrines,  creeds,  rites,  ceremonies,  con- 
stitution, discipline,  all  these  are  vain  if  the 
Church  does  not  teach  and  show  to  the  world 
the  new  life.  "  Though  I  speak  with  the 
tongues  of  men  and  of  angels  .  .  .  though 
I  have  the  gift  of  prophecy  and  know  all 
mysteries  and  all  knowledge,  and  though  I 
give  all  my  goods  to  feed  the  poor  and  my 
body  to  be  burned,  and  have  not  love,  I  am 
nothing."  In  the  long  run  the  most  dis- 
astrous failure  of  the  Church  is  the  failure 
to  love.  It  is  that  which  does  more  than  any- 
thing else  to  alienate  the  man  of  good  will. 
When  he  finds  in  the  Church  the  spirit  of 
exclusiveness,   the  spirit  that  sets   store  by 


The  Church  and  Human  Relations      6^ 

class  distinctions,  and  class  prejudices,  the 
spirit  of  self-satisfied  aloofness  from  the 
troubles  of  the  unfortunate,  then  he  con- 
demns the  Church,  not  for  her  Christianity, 
but  for  her  lack  of  it.  And  he  is  entitled  to 
do  so.  Did  not  the  Master  say,  "  By  this 
shall  all  men  know  that  ye  are  my  disciples, 
if  ye  have  love  one  to  another  "  ? 

Let  us  be  frank.  In  spite  of  the  multi- 
tude of  her  alms,  the  wide-spread  net  of  her 
"  charity,"  the  Church  Is  lacking  In  love. 
Church  people  are  apt  to  thank  God  that 
they  are  not  as  other  men.  The  man  or 
woman  who  has  poor  garments  Is  not  made  to 
feel  that  In  the  house  of  God,  at  any  rate,  he 
or  she  is  welcomed  as  an  honoured  guest, 
which  is  undoubtedly  how  Jesus  Christ  would 
wish  such  to  be  welcomed.  '*  I  cannot  go  to 
church  because  I  have  no  clothes,"  says  the 
poor  woman.  "  I  have  given  up  going  to 
Communion  till  I  can  get  a  new  suit.     The 


66  The  Church  and  the  Man 

people  stared  so,"  said  an  emigrant  in  an 
Australian  mining  town.  "  I  didn't  go  to 
church  because  I  was  always  put  in  the  back 
seats,  and  didn't  seem  to  be  welcome,"  said 
a  poor  man  who  had  shown  wonderful  faith 
during  a  long  and  painful  illness.  "  Suit- 
able accommodation  is  reserved  for  the  poor 
of  the  parish,"  ran  the  legend  in  a  large 
country  church.  "  I  wouldn't  go  to  church 
if  I  had  nasty  smelly  people  next  to  me,"  said 
a  lady  church-goer.  Such  things  should  make 
us  blush  for  very  shame. 

We  have  got  to  face  this  question  of  the 
Church  and  social  distinctions.  We  have 
got  to  settle  this  question  of  human  values. 
It  is  not  going  to  be  easy.  It  is  not  going  to 
be  a  matter  of  gush.  No  amount  of  mere 
talk  about  *'  brotherhood  "  is  going  to  slur 
over  the  existence  and  the  recognition  within 
the  Church  of  a  sort  of  pride  that  is  about  as 
definitely  unchristian  as  anything  well  could 


The  Church  and  Human  Relations      67 

be.  Further,  we  are  not  going  to  solve  this 
question  by  denying  distinctions  which  obvi- 
ously do  exist,  and  by  proclaiming  an  equal- 
ity which  obviously  does  not  exist.  Our 
brotherly  love  has  got  to  be  a  practical  thing 
which  will  take  count  of  facts. 

It  is  perfectly  true  that  some  men  are  better 
educated,  have  better  taste,  liner  Instincts 
than  others.  It  is  perfectly  true  that  some 
men  are  better  fitted  to  teach  or  to  govern 
or  to  direct  than  others.  It  is  perfectly 
true  that  in  the  life  of  Church  and  na- 
tion there  must  be  authority  and  discipline. 
It  is  useless  to  deny  these  very  patent  facts. 
It  is  also  quite  evident  that  it  is  not  within  the 
power  of  the  Church  to  decide  whether  the 
privileges  of  education  and  responsibility  are 
to  be  hereditary  or  not.  The  Church  has  to 
deal  with  the  social  structure  that  has  been 
evolved  by  the  nation,  and  to  make  the  best 
of  It.     It  is  not  the  business  of  the  Church 


68  The  Church  and  the  Man 

to  identify  herself  with  definite  political 
movements.  Individual  Churchmen  may 
properly  do  so.  The  Church  as  such  may 
not. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  Church  is  not  being 
true  to  her  Master  unless  she  can  show  how 
the  social  structure  can  be  permeated  with 
real  unity  and  real  love.  If  it  Is  not  possible 
for  master  and  man,  employer  and  employed, 
landlord  and  tenant,  officer  and  soldier,  to  be 
united  in  Christ's  fellowship  of  love,  then  the 
Church  cannot  be  true  to  her  Ideals,  Chris- 
tianity Is  unpractical  and  impracticable.  We 
had  better  give  it  up.  If,  on  the  other  hand, 
Christianity  gives  us  a  point  of  view  from 
which  it  is  possible  to  recognize  both  dis- 
tinctions and  the  brotherhood  of  man,  the 
Church  must  try  to  show  an  example  of  how 
this  double  recognition  can  be  effected.  St. 
Paul  tries  to  show  us  how  he  thinks  this  can 
be  done.     We  are  all  members  of  one  Body 


The  Church  and  Human  Relations      69 

—  the  Body  of  Christ;  but  every  member  has 
not  the  same  function.  The  foot  is  not  the 
hand,  nor  the  hand  the  eye.  There  are  di- 
versities of  gifts;  but  there  should  be  the 
same  Spirit.  Each  member  has  his  partic- 
ular gifts  and  his  particular  functions.  All 
are  necessary.  All  are  interdependent.  To 
the  full  working  of  the  Body  the  efficiency  of 
every  member  is  essential.  No  one  member 
can  suffer  without  all  the  others  suffering. 
None  are  to  be  despised.  All  are  to  be 
honoured,  for  all  are  indispensable.  Indeed, 
very  often  it  is  just  the  member  which  is  least 
attractive,  least  "  comely,"  whose  efficiency 
is  most  important. 

Here  is  the  basis  of  sound  democracy  — 
sane  mutual  respect.  We  cannot  all  be  man- 
agers, foremen,  officers,  masters.  The 
master  without  the  man  is  as  useless  as  the 
man  without  the  master.  At  the  very  start 
it  is  necessary  that  they  must  respect  each 


70  The  Church  and  the  Man 

other,  and  recognize  that  the  other's  func- 
tion is  a  necessary  and  therefore  an  honour- 
able one.  We  must  get  it  out  of  our  heads 
that  manual  labour,  dirty  labour,  labour  in- 
volving obedience  to  orders,  are  degrading. 
No  labour  is  degrading.  All  honest,  neces- 
sary, useful  labour  is  honourable.  The  clean 
hands  and  tidy  clothes  of  the  clerk  or  the  shop 
assistant  do  not  constitute  him  a  superior  per- 
son to  the  navvy  with  his  hard  rough  hands 
and  his  muddy  breeches.  Nor  do  the  strong 
muscles  and  tanned  skin  of  the  navvy  consti- 
tute him  a  superior  person  to  the  pale  and 
puny  clerk.  In  so  far  as  each  is  doing  neces- 
sary and  useful  work  each  should  respect  the 
other.  They  belong  to  different  classes.  It 
is  inevitable  that,  as  a  rule,  each  should  find 
his  most  congenial  friends  among  those  who 
follow  his  own  manner  of  life.  It  is  inevit- 
able that  each  should  have  his  own  way  of 
spending  his  leisure.     It  is  inevitable  that 


The  Church  and  Human  Relations      71 

they  should  eat  different  food,  drink  different 
liquids,  and  wear  different  clothes.  But  they 
should  not  despise  one  another.  Above  all, 
they  should  not  forget  that  they  are  sons  of 
one  Father,  servants  of  one  Master,  temples 
of  one  Spirit,  members  of  one  Body,  and  that 
each  is  necessary  to  the  other  In  the  building 
up  of  that  Body. 

All  this  is  such  platitude  that  it  seems 
hardly  worth  writing  down,  and  yet  when  one 
comes  to  think  of  it  our  national  life  is  simply 
made  up  of  Individual  pride  and  mutual  con- 
tempt. Each  little  section  of  society  sets 
store  by  the  distinctions  in  appearance  and 
manner  and  intonation  and  way  of  living  that 
divide  It  off  from  others.  Each  little  section 
fights  for  Its  own  political  Interest,  completely 
oblivious  of  the  Interests  of  those  other  sec- 
tions whose  well-being  Is  none  the  less  inti- 
mately bound  up  with  Its  own.  Each  little 
section  prides  itself  on  keeping  itself  to  itself 


72  The  Church  and  the  Man 

on  every  possible  opportunity  and  in  every 
department  of  life.  Men  impose  limitations 
on  themselves,  conventions  and  prejudices 
that  narrow  their  sympathies,  hamper  their 
generous  instincts,  destroy  their  freedom;  and 
then  they  hug  to  themselves  those  -limitations, 
glory  in  their  self-forged  chains.  Jim  and 
Jack  may  be  friends  at  school.  They  may 
worship  at  the  same  church.  They  may  be 
kindred  spirits;  but  if  Jack  works  with  his 
coat  off  and  Jim  with  his  on,  if  Jack  has  a 
large  family  and  has  to  live  in  a  poor  neigh- 
bourhood while  Jim  has  no  family  and  lives  in 
a  suburb,  they  will  no  longer  be  seen  together. 
In  this  matter  women  are  even  worse  than 
men.  A  man  while  he  is  single  may  make 
what  friends  he  likes,  and  keep  what  friends 
he  likes.  He  may  live  and  give  his  affections 
in  freedom.  But  let  him  marry  and  he  is 
Immediately   pigeon-holed,    labelled   with    a 


The  Church  and  Human  Relations      73 

class,  and  henceforward  he  must  not  stray 
beyond  that  pigeon-hole. 

Class  distinctions  as  we  honour  them  and 
as  the  Church  recognizes  them  are  a  form  of 
slavery.  They  limit  freedom.  They  check 
natural  impulses  and  affections.  They  pro- 
mote jealousy  and  pride  and  strife.  Christ 
offers  us  liberty,  and  commands  us  to  love. 

The  foundation  of  Christian  liberty,  in  this 
matter  as  in  every  other,  is  simply  the  vision 
of  God.  Once  realize  how  far  God  is  re- 
moved from  man,  and  realize  how  His  Love 
has  bridged  that  gulf,  and  then  all  the  petty 
pride  and  jealousy  of  human  distinctions 
vanish  from  sight.  If  when  men  and  women 
knelt  or  (for  fear  of  bagging  the  knees  of 
their  trousers)  bowed  their  heads  in  church, 
they  realized  that  they  were  approaching  the 
Infinite  and  Eternal,  they  could  not  go  on 
priding  themselves  on  the  petty  distinctions 


74  The  Church  and  the  Man 

of  class,  the  soft  white  hands,  the  well-fitting 
clothes,  the  clean,  starched  collars,  and  well- 
brushed  hair.  Their  sense  of  humour  would 
set  them  free.  But  there  is  no  real  worship 
in  our  services.  There  is  no  sense  of  pro- 
portion in  our  prayers.  God  forgive  us,  we 
have  no  eyes,  no  ears,  no  understanding,  no 
sense  of  humour,  no  faith.  We  need 
prophets  to  get  up  in  our  pulpits  and  mock  at 
us.  We  want  sain»ts  who  by  abandoning 
rank  and  wealth,  and  by  living  humble  loving 
lives,  will  hold  up  to  derision  our  false  gods. 
With  the  "  man  in  the  street "  it  is  not 
words  that  count,  but  deeds.  It  has  always 
been  so.  He  needs  the  symbolism  of  action. 
It  is  not  the  words  of  Christ  but  His  Cross 
that  makes  men  love  Him.  It  is  not  the  Ser- 
mon on  the  Mount,  but  the  spitting  and  the 
scourging  and  the  naked  body  exposed  to 
mockery  and  insult  that  makes  men  take  Him 
seriously.     So  with  His  Body  the  Church,  it 


The  Church  and  Human  Relations     75 

Is  not  sermons  which  are  going  to  win  the 
souls  of  men,  but  the  symbolizing  of  faith  in 
action.  The  chaplain  who  descends  from  the 
first  or  second  class  of  a  liner  to  address  the 
steerage  does  not  have  one-quarter  the  hear- 
ing that  he  would  have  if  he  travelled  steer- 
age. The  steerage  passengers  know  that  he 
is  the  representative  of  the  great  Teacher  of 
humility,  and  they  feel  that  he  is  not  living 
the  gospel  that  he  preaches.  The  army 
chaplain  who  lives  at  brigade  headquarters, 
and  ministers  to  such  battalions  as  are  in 
reserve  or  at  rest,  does  not  get  half  the  hear- 
ing that  he  would  have  if  the  men  had  seen 
him  sharing  their  privations,  their  dangers, 
their  boredom,  in  the  front  line  trenches. 
To  the  man  in  the  street  the  religion  of  Christ 
is  before  everything  else  a  religion  of  love 
and  humility.  The  preacher  who  shows  him 
these  will  be  listened  to  with  respect,  however 
faltering    his    tongue,    however    faulty    his 


76  The  Church  and  the  Man 

logic.  It  is  the  same  with  the  Church  as  a 
whole.  The  man  in  the  street  does  not  be- 
lieve in  the  Church  because  he  does  not  be- 
lieve in  her  sincerity,  and  he  does  not  believe 
in  her  sincerity  because  he  sees  in  her  corpo- 
rate life  neither  humility  nor  love,  but  only 
the  repetition  of  the  same  class  pride, 
party  strife,  prejudices,  and  divisions  that  he 
sees  in  society  as  a  whole. 

I  have  written  elsewhere  of  the  men  who 
at  this  time  of  national  danger  have  sunk 
their  differences,  swallowed  their  pride,  over- 
come their  prejudices,  and  enlisted  in  the 
citizen  army  to  fight  with  those  whom  for- 
merly they  despised  and  disliked,  for  a  com- 
mon ideal.  In  the  army,  men  are  learning 
what  poor  things  their  pride  and  prejudices 
were.  They  are  learning  the  value  of  the 
virtues  which  are  common  to  all  classes,  the 
fundamental  virtues  of  courage  and  cheerful- 
ness, and  unselfishness,  and  honesty.     They 


The  Church  and  Human  Relations     77 

are  learning  to  love  and  honour  men  with 
whom  in  civil  life  they  would  have  had  no 
dealings.  When  the  war  is  over  It  must  be 
the  care  of  the  Church  to  show  these  men 
how  In  the  fellowship  of  Christ's  Body  they 
may  still  use  their  diversities  of  gifts,  In  the 
same  spirit  of  mutual  respect  and  loyalty,  and 
for  the  furtherance  of  a  common  ideal  of 
life. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

MISSIONS 

There  are  few  subjects  about  which  the 
keen  Churchman  is  more  convinced  and  the 
average  man  more  dubious  than  the  neces- 
sity for  and  utility  of  foreign  missions.  The 
'keen  Churchman  feels  that  it  is  one  of  the 
chief  duties  of  the  Church  to  spread  the  gos- 
pel until  *'  the  earth  shall  be  full  of  the  knowl- 
edge of  the  Lord  as  the  waters  cover  the  sea." 
The  average  man  questions  whether  the 
Church  is  fit  to  preach  till  she  has  set  her 
own  house  in  order,  and  points  to  travellers' 
tales  of  the  failure  of  missions  as  a  proof 
that  his  scepticism  is  justified. 

For  both  these  views  there  is  a  certain 
amount  of  justification.  On  the  one  hand,  it 
78 


Missions  79 

is  a  law  of  nature  and  of  God  that  that  which 
does  not  fulfil  its  destiny  shall  die.  If  the 
Church  is  not  missionary  she  will  die.  On 
the  other  hand,  it  is  indisputable  that  the  suc- 
cess of  missions  is  not  what  one  would  expect. 
Missionaries  do  an  enormous  amount  of 
good  in  the  way  of  education  and  medical 
relief;  but  the  number  of  their  converts,  and 
the  character  of  their  converts,  is  disappoint- 
ing, and  so  is  their  total  effect  on  the  life  of 
the  people  among  whom  they  work.  Some- 
thing is  wrong  with  missionary  methods. 

Personally  I  can  only  speak  from  the  point 
of  view  of  a  traveller  in  missionary  countries 
{e.^,  Madagascar,  British  East  Africa, 
Mauritius,  Ceylon) — a  traveller  who  has 
wished  to  think  well  of  missions,  and  has 
been  at  some  pains  to  understand  their  diffi- 
culties, and  to  estimate  their  degree  of  suc- 
cess. Perhaps  it  may  not  be  out  of  place  for 
me  to  say,  as  a  proof  of  my  good  will  towards 


8o  The  Church  and  the  Man 

missions,  that  some  six  years  ago  I  did  actu- 
ally volunteer  for  missionary  service  in  Cen- 
tral Africa  but  was  rejected  on  medical 
grounds. 

Generally  speaking,  the  charge  against  mis- 
sions is  that  they  make  few  converts  and  have 
a  pernicious  effect  on  those  whom  they  influ- 
ence. It  is  an  old  story  that  the  mission  boy 
is  the  biggest  rascal  to  be  found,  far  more  dis- 
honest than  the  unregenerate  savage.  Of 
course,  I  am  talking  chiefly  of  Africa.  I 
honestly  do  not  think  that  it  is  enough  to 
answer  that  charge  by  a  denial.  It  has  ap- 
peared to  me  that  a  great  many  natives  at- 
tend the  mission  schools,  and  even  simulate 
conversion,  for  purposes  of  their  own. 
They  want  to  become  servants,  or  in  some 
fashion  to  be  the  go-between  to  the  white  man 
and  the  native,  which  Is  often  a  profitable 
occupation.  Unfortunately,  It  is  often  not 
a  very  honest  one.     A  native  head-boy  will 


Missions  8 1 

often  cheat  the  other  boys  of  part  of  their 
wages,  and  deduct  a  percentage  for  himself 
when  paying  his  master's  bills.  Native 
guides  are  generally  rogues,  and  often  pimps. 
In  order  to  enter  any  of  these  lucrative  and 
rather  dishonest  professions,  the  first  essen- 
tial is  to  learn  English,  and  the  easiest  way  to 
do  that  is  often  to  attend  the  mission  school. 
I  have  even  known  cases  where  natives  have 
become  priests  in  the  English  Church  solely 
for  mercenary  reasons,  and  very  unpleasant 
people  they  are.  It  would  almost  seem  as 
though,  in  order  to  make  real  converts,  it 
would  be  necessary  to  take  precautions 
against  its  being  worth  while  from  the 
worldly  point  of  view  for  natives  to  become 
converts. 

A  further  very  real  difficulty  of  the  present 
system  is  that  as  soon  as  a  native  becomes  a 
Christian  he  ceases  to  be  uncivilized,  and 
becomes  semi-civilized.     He  wears  trousers 


82  The  Church  and  the  Man 

and  a  jacket  instead  of  a  blanket  and  a  coat 
of  grease.  A  female  wears  petticoats  and  a 
blouse  instead  of  the  old  short  skirt  which  in 
European  eyes  is  so  immodest.  It  is  hard  to 
see  how  this  can  altogether  be  avoided,  for 
undoubtedly  in  the  case  of  unregenerate  sav- 
ages the  introduction  of  Christianity  is  bound  ' 
to  revolutionize  the  whole  social  outlook. 
The  Christian  native  can  no  longer  buy  a 
dozen  wives,  and  amuse  himself  by  hunting 
and  fighting  while  his  wives  do  the  work. 
And  I  suppose  that  the  modest  attire  of  the 
white  woman  is  only  a  sjmibol  of  the  altered 
attitude  of  her  menfolk  towards  her.  Yet 
the  effect  often  is  to  make  the  savage  into  a 
bad  imitation  of  a  white  man,  and  to  cause 
him  to  thank  God  that  he  is  not  as  other  men, 
which  Is  a  definitely  unchristian  frame  of 
mind  to  be  in.  To  say  the  truth,  when  the 
mission  boy  is  not  a  rogue  he  is  often  some- 
thing of  a  prig. 


Missions  83 

I  fancy  that  if  I  were  a  savage  I  should 
regard  the  Christian  life,  not  as  a  fuller, 
freer,  nobler  life  than  mine,  but  as  a  duller, 
more  restricted  kind  of  life,  with  certain  com- 
pensations in  the  form  of  self-esteem  and 
comfort  and  opportunities  for  making  money. 

I  confess  that  with  regard  to  some  mis- 
sions that  I  have  come  across  I  have  found 
myself  wondering  whether  after  all  they 
were  teaching  Christianity,  or  a  kind  of 
adapted  English  respectability  which  was  not 
really  a  religious  thing  at  all.  I  have  heard 
the  same  sort  of  criticism  made  even  by  mis- 
sionaries themselves  of  missions  in  India. 

Perhaps  we  are  not  sufficiently  clear  our- 
selves about  the  real  content  of  Christianity. 
Perhaps  we  confuse  It  in  our  minds  with  ele- 
ments which,  though  associated  with  Chris- 
tianity in  England,  are  not  really  a  part  of 
Christianity  at  all.  Perhaps  we  adopt  a 
wrong  attitude  towards  our  black  brethren. 


84  The  Church  and  the  Man 

Christianity,  after  all,  Is  not  a  matter  of 
clothes  or  of  speech.  It  Is  possible  to  be  a 
Christian  and  wear  a  blanket  and  be  unable 
to  speak  a  word  even  of  pidgin-English. 
Brother  black  is  probably  a  good  deal  less 
immodest  than  he  looks,  and  possibly  we  are 
a  good  deal  more  prurient  than  he.  Chris- 
tianity will  not  change  his  colour  or  his  cli- 
mate or  the  shape  of  his  skull,  and  so  pos- 
sibly we  ought  not  to  permit  him  to  Imitate 
us,  but  rather  urge  him  to  be  his  own  best 
self,  in  a  manner  suited  to  the  conditions  of 
his  existence.  The  two  chief  Christian  vir- 
tues are,  perhaps,  humility  and  unselfishness, 
and  I  somehow  fancy  that  these  have  been 
Insufficiently  insisted  on  in  some  missions. 

I  have  not  said  anything  about  the  wicked 
settlers  or  the  district  commissioners,  whose 
unchristian  example  Is  so  often  alleged  as  a 
cause  of  the  failure  of  missions,  because  I 
am  quite  sure  that  the  less  the  missionary 


Missions  85 

has  to  do  with  them,  and  the  less  he  identifies 
himself  with  them,  the  better  he  will  suc- 
ceed. Generally  the  official  Is  a  good  friend 
to  the  native.  Often  the  settler  is  not. 
Neither  is  apt  to  favour  the  missionary. 
Unfortunately,  at  first  the  native  is  apt  to 
lump  all  white  men  together,  rather  to  the 
missionaries'  dismay.  But  they  must  play 
their  own  game  as  Independently  as  possible, 
and  trust  to  time  to  set  matters  right.  Nev- 
ertheless, it  is  a  great  advantage  if  the  mis- 
sionary can  be  first  in  the  field.  In  the  Hova 
country  in  the  centre  of  Madagascar  the  mis- 
sionary arrived  first.  After  he  had  made  a 
good  deal  of  headway,  he  was  expelled  from 
the  country,  and  the  native  Church  was  ex- 
posed to  a  severe  persecution.  The  result  is 
that  in  the  Hova  country  one  finds  the  nearest 
approach  that  I  know  of  to  a  native  Church 
racy  of  the  soil.  Every  village  seems  to 
have  its  place  of  Christian  worship.     Tan- 


86  The  Church  and  the  Man 

anarive  is  full  of  churches  of  all  denomina- 
tions, and  when  I  attended  Holy  Communion 
in  the  cathedral  I  found  myself  in  the  midst 
of  a  huge  Hova  congregation,  listening  to  the 
service  in  the  native  tongue,  and  felt  as  I 
have  never  felt  before  or  since  the  possibil- 
ities of  foreign  missions.  I  believe  that  in 
some  measure  the  U.M.C.A.  and  the  C.M.S. 
In  Uganda  have*  also  profited  by  being 
first  In  the  field,  arriving  In  the  country 
with  no  protection,  and  depending  for  their 
success  almost  wholly  on  the  power  of  Christ 
crucified. 

I  have  not  mentioned  Christian  disunion  as 
a  source  of  failure,  because  I  am  convinced 
that  the  real  cause  of  failure  lies  much 
deeper,  and  because  I  am  also  convinced  that 
organized  co-operation  is  only  a  very  small 
step  towards  success.  There  Is  only  one  way 
to  win  men  to  Christ,  and  that  Is  to  show  to 
them  something  of  His  love,  and  humility, 


Missions  87 

and  quiet  strength,  and  humorous  common 
sense,  His  distrust  of  the  efficacy  of  human 
aids  to  success,  and  His  quiet  confidence  in 
the  power  of  love  and  truth. 

There  are,  dotted  about  the  world,  many 
*  poor  missions,  where  men  and  women,  often 
lacking  in  tact  and  breadth  of  mind  and  edu- 
cation, toil  year  after  year  to  win  the  heathen 
by  loving  and  humble  service.  They  do  not 
succeed.  They  are  often  despised  alike  by 
European  travellers  and  by  the  natives  them- 
selves. Yet  inasmuch  as  they  are  witnessing 
in  their  lives  to  the  truth  that  love  and  humil- 
ity and  purity  are  stronger  than  money  and 
organization  and  wisdom,  I  am  convinced 
that  they  are  sowing  a  harvest  which  another 
will  reap.  No  one  is  such  a  vulgar,  snob- 
bish materialist  as  the  native  when  he  first 
comes  into  contact  with  civilization.  Civil- 
ization comes  with  arms  full  of  glittering  toys 
for  which  the  native  reaches  out  both  hands, 


88  The  Church  and  the  Man 

and  for  which  he  will  submit  to  discipline, 
and  sacrifice  his  most  ancient  customs  and 
habits.  As  yet  he  has  no  eyes  for  spiritual 
riches,  yet  their  turn  will  come,  and  it  is  for 
the  Church  to  witness  to  them  meanwhile  in 
humility  and  love  and  patience  and  faith. 

This  may  sound  inconclusive;  but  after  all, 
is  not  our  experience  of  home  missions  much 
the  same?  It  is  easy  enough  to  succeed  in 
filling  clubs,  but  much  harder  to  fill  churches. 
And  the  cause  is  often  that  the  missionaries 
themselves  have  not  a  clear  enough  idea 
about  where  middle-class  respectability  ends 
and  Christianity  begins.  Too  often  the  boys 
and  men  whom  they  convert  show  but  one 
sign  of  their  change  of  mind  —  a  shame  of 
their  work  and  poverty  and  class  and  the 
genesis  of  a  social  ambition.  Too  often  the 
outward  sign  of  conversion  is  a  collar  rather 
than  unselfishness,  and  too  often  the  collar 


Missions  89 

Is  really  the  symbol  of  a  new  servitude  rather 
than  of  a  new  liberty. 

Perhaps  this  chapter  Is  an  Impertinence. 
I  have  written  it,  not  because  I  regard  myself 
as  an  expert,  but  because  I  have  tried  to  be 
a  friendly  critic.  Six  years  ago  at  Oxford 
I  joined  a  "  Missionary  Campaign,"  and 
stumped  the  country  uttering  perfervid  de- 
nunciations of  the  critics  of  missions.  I 
could  not  do  that  quite  In  the  same  way  now. 
As  a  Churchman  I  feel  that  the  hour  of  self- 
crltlclsm  and  repentance  should  not  pass  us 
by  without  some  thought  of  the  failure  of 
missions. 


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'HE  following  pages  contain  advertisements  of  a  few 
of  the  Macmillan  books  on  kindred  subjects. 


A  Theology  for  the 
Social  Gospel 

By  WALTER  RAUSCHENBUSCH 

Author  of  "  Christianity  and  the  Social  Crisis  "  and 
"Christianizing  the  Social  Order" 

Cloth,  i2mo,  $1.50 

This  book,  which  embodies  the  Taylor  Lec- 
tures given  at  Yale  during  Convocation  Week  in 
April,  1917,  takes  up  the  old  doctrines  of  the 
Christian  faith,  such  as  Original  Sin,  The  Atone- 
ment, Inspiration,  The  Sacraments,  and  shows 
how  they  can  be  re-interpreted  from  a  modern 
social  point  of  view  and  expanded  in  their  scope 
so  that  they  will  make  room  for  the  salvation  of 
society  as  well  as  for  the  salvation  of  individuals. 
The  work  is  practical  and  inspiring  and  covers 
ground  not  previously  traversed  by  writers. 


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Are  You  Human  ? 

By  WILLIAM  DEWITT  HYDE 

50  cents 

"Like  a  stinging  fresh  breeze  laden  with  the  very 
salt  of  life  and  vigor.  .  .  .  Every  man  in  his  young  days 
ought  to  get  and  digest  this  book." —  Pacific  Churchman. 

"  A  song  of  quick  hope  for  the  living." —  Oakland 
Tribune. 

"  A  vast  amount  of  wisdom  Is  compressed  into  small 
compass." — Charleston  News  and  Courier. 

"An  admirable  little  gift  to  lay  upon  the  table  of 
every  high  school  and  college  boy  in  the  land." —  Unity. 

"  Inspiring  and  encouraging  thoughts  presented  in  at- 
tention-arresting fashion  for  busy  people." — Nashville 
Banner. 

It's  All  in  the  Day  s  Work 

By  henry  CHURCHILL  KING 

50  cents 

"Good  bracing  counsel,  such  as  the  young  men  and 
women,  at  Oberlin  or  anywhere  else  may  profit  by, 
abounds  in  Dr.  King's  pages.  It  is  a  book  for  all  who 
wish  to  acquit  themselves  well  in  the  battle  of  life." — 
The  Dial. 

"A  fine  combination  of  the  essay  and  the  sermon, 
with  none  of  the  stilted  style  of  the  former,  and  with 
the  directness  of  the  latter,  but  better  than  either  be- 
cause of  the  sustained  interest  and  the  personal  touch. 

"  It  is  a  fresh,  breezy,  and  brave  appeal  to  face  life 
as  it  is,  and  to  make  the  best  of  it.  It  is  only  a  little 
book,  but  it  is  a  book  for  big  men,  whether  sixteen  or 
sixty." —  Universalist  Leader. 


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Why  Men  Pray 


By  dr.  CHARLES  L.  SLATTERY, 
Rector  of  Grace  Church,  New  York 

Cloth,  i2mo,  p. 00 

Dr.  Slattery's  handling  of  his  subject  is  fresh, 
unconventional,  and  remarkably  liberal  in  tone; 
he  writes  with  sympathy  and  deep  religious  in- 
sight of  a  question  close  to  the  thought  of  a  great 
number  of  people.  The  theme  is  developed  in  a 
steadily  climactic  line  toward  the  heights  of  spir- 
itual thought,  with  frequent  pertinent  illustra- 
tions from  personal  experiences.  The  author  is 
in  the  front  rank  of  the  younger  men  in  the  Epis- 
copal Ministry;  his  book  carries  an  authoritative 
and  appreciative  message  to  the  steadily  increas- 
ing number  of  people  who  find  prayer  of  intimate 
and  significant  value  in  their  daily  lives. 

"  A  little  volume  of  unusual  power  and  insight. 
.  .  .  The  meaning  of  prayer,  its  value  and  results 
in  life  and  character  are  very  practically  and 
helpfully  explained." —  Independent. 


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CHURCH  PmNCIPLES  FOR  LAY  PEOPLE 

The  Episcopal  Church : 
Its  Faith  and  Order 

By  GEORGE  HODGES 

Cloth,  i2mo,  $1.00 
A  concise  statement  of  the  doctrine  and  disci- 
pline of  the  Episcopal  Church. 

Why  Men  Pray 

By  dr.  CHARLES  L.  SLATTERY, 
Rector  of  Grace  Church,  New  York 

Cloth,  i2mo,  $1.00 
"  The  meaning  of  prayer,  its  value  and  results 
in  life  and  character  are  very  practically  and 
helpfully  explained." —  The  Independent. 

The  Apostles'  Creed  To-day 

By  EDWARD  S.  DROWN,  D.D. 

Cloth,  i2mo,  $1.00 
Written  to  satisfy  the  doubts  of  the  sceptical, 
to   clarify  the  thought  of   Churchmen,   and  to 
vitalize  the  work  of  the  adult  Bible  class. 

The  Christian  Ministry  and 
Social  Problems 

By  bishop  CHARLES  D.  WILLIAMS 

Cloth,  i2mo,  $1.00 

-'  A  little  book  of  undoubted  sincerity  that  can- 
not fail  to  appeal  to  the  many  of  Mr.  Williams 
mode  of  thought." —  Boston  Herald. 

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